Coronavirus
Coronavirus, COVID-19, is spreading exponentially. So far we have seen news reports from countries where there is an organised and rapid response to outbreaks. But what we are beginning to see now is it's rate of infection in countries without such preparedness. Italy and more worrying Iran. Italy is adopting a very strict strategy now, after being slow to tackle the infection. Whereas Iran is in denial, they are refusing to quarantine suspected cases. They have refused to lock down an important religious site which appears to be the epicentre of their outbreak. Also it has been spreading amongst the political class. There is talk of it's spreading rapidly throughout the Middle East.
What concerns me is that the chaos which will ensue in the Middle East, the virus will find a breeding ground and develop into a more deadly strain. Similarly to the way that Spanish Flu developed during the chaos of the First World War.
Should we be worried, or should we just wait until a vaccination is developed so that we can irradicate it through a vaccination programme?
Or is this the beginning of a deadly pandemic?
What concerns me is that the chaos which will ensue in the Middle East, the virus will find a breeding ground and develop into a more deadly strain. Similarly to the way that Spanish Flu developed during the chaos of the First World War.
Should we be worried, or should we just wait until a vaccination is developed so that we can irradicate it through a vaccination programme?
Or is this the beginning of a deadly pandemic?
Comments (8466)
The coronavirus has killed about 2,700 people so far. The flu kills roughly 60,000-70,000 people each year.
How does the new coronavirus compare with the flu?
Don't panic yet. There will be plenty of time for hysteria once people start dropping like flies, which hasn't happened so far.
Respiratory infections (almost always caused by one virus or another) are very difficult to control because they are so readily contagious. Alls it takes is one strategic uncovered sneeze on the bus, and presto, maybe 20 people are exposed before they can flee at the next stop. Or less dramatically, just breathing the same air for a while -- like on a plane, a bus, a small office, etc.
The mortality rate (= you're dead) for this virus is not astoundingly high -- maybe 1% or 2%, maybe a bit higher. That's not insignificant because it can mean hundreds of death per 100,000 cases. The mortality rate for the 1918 influenza epidemic was 20%; many millions of people died during that epidemic lasting around a year. Ebola and Marburg viruses, and some of the other newly emerged infections, have mortality rates over 50%. Untreated rabies has a 100% mortality rate.
So, while a pandemic of Covid-19 would not be a picnic, it wouldn't be the end of life as we know it, either. Of course, this virus has been active only since December -- far short of enough time for us to have any understanding of how it will behave in the future. The worst - case scenario would be that no effective vaccine is developed (which is unlikely) or that it will not have seasonality and be active throughout the year.
Most people are not going to be very sick at all. Older people (like... 60 and up) and people with weak immune systems of any age are likely to be the most common fatalities.
The dark side of all this is that no nation, however developed, is going to be ready for a bad epidemic. It's just not possible. For instance, if New York City had 30,000 serious covid-19 cases, it would not have enough hospital beds to handle a contagious infection. New York would have to do what China did -- put the sick people together in huge wards (not in hospital buildings) to provide care while not exposing every other sick person in the hospital to something which might well finish them off. The staff would have to dress for bio-hazard protection, which in itself makes work more difficult (like you get hot).
If there are many cases in a city, people will do well to self-quarantine--something more palatable to civil libertarians than forced quarantines. If you feel sick, go home and stay there. If you are very very sick, they can come get you in an ambulance. If you are not very very sick, try to cope on your own. If you are not sick and don't have to mix in public, then don't. Stay home. Fuck work. Capitalists will have to adjust to people not being able to maintain production.
This approach will work over the relative short run. People can't self-quarantine for weeks or months -- they'd starve, eventually. Might as well go out for groceries and take your chances.
It appears that a lot of the new viral infections that have cropped up in the last 30 or 40 years come from bats. Why bats? For various reasons, bats have very tolerant immune systems: they can harbor all sorts of viruses without getting sick, and without destroying the viruses. So when people come in contact with bat feces, bat urine, or bat blood (whatever), or trade in wild animals that have come into contact with bats, they are likely to become sick with something humans have not previously encountered. That's the story for ebola, for example. The covid-19 virus could have bat origins too -- don't know, just speculating.
Some of our worst diseases circulate in other animals and ourselves. The influenza virus regularly circulates through birds and swine (sequentially) and in the process is shaped into a more or less dangerous virus that emerges in Asia and then spreads around the world to humans. SARS, MERS, and other respiratory infections behave similarly with different animals involved. Bird flu, which didn't make a lot of people sick, had a 60% mortality rate among birds. It also was cooked up in Asia.
Why Asia? Asian farming practices have swine and fowl mixing in the same barn yards, same water holes, and same barns. There's lots of opportunity for disease to breed among the various birds and hogs. American and European meat and egg production farms keep fowl and swine isolated from much contact with people and certainly with each other. Hogs and fowl never lay eyes on each other.
American farms used to look a lot more like Asian farms, but because American farms were far more dispersed, there was less chance of transmission from one batch of farm animals to another. Still, American farmers have disease problems which have to be monitored carefully.
This is making news here, as there's a larger outbreak in the area of Northern Italy only 300km south of the Austrian boarder.
Oddly enough, there aren't too many folks that are overly concerned or much less in panic.
I suppose the reason for this is as of yesterday evening it was reported that of the 45,000 cases of the virus in China 81% of those cases are mild, 14% are more severe like a Pneumonia and 5% are indeed life threatening. When the cases were broken down accoring to age there is a clear correlation between age and the severity of the virus, where of people under 40 only 0.2% are very serious. In the age group of 40 to 60 only 0.8% are very serious. As the patients become more advanced in year the threat increases dramatically... those 60 to 69yrs 3.9% - 70 to 79yrs 8% - 80 and over 14% are very serious. The danger to age correlation is about the same as in the current Flu we have in Europe that no one is really in panic about. The death rate of this Coronavirus (1.7%) is greater than the Flu (1.1%), but we aren't really talking panepidemic.
Another correlation is that those who have died have pre-existing conditions of diabetes, high blood pressure and heart diseases. Very few people without such a pre-existing conditions have severe case or have died, but only have a mild or slightly severe illness.
Indeed there is the panic. That's no surprise. The mass selling of surgical masks is really booming as a business, which makes little sense as those masks only help the infected not to infect the uninfected, but they really do next to nothing to prevent catching the virus, but I suppose panic does what panic wants to and believes what panic makes one believe.
In my case, I usually travel to the same region of Italy that is currently affect with the outbreak, but we had to cancel the trip due to my training partner starting is Paternity leave only a week after the planned trip. It's simply bad timing for his place or work (a genetic lab that work in Virology... so of ironic I guess) to take 10 days off just before he takes 6 months off. To be honest, I'm happy we canceled it due to the massive inconvenience of so many places having to close due to fear.
Meow!
GREG
I've had really bad colds that pushed my tolerance of being sick to the limit; constant coughing, sinus infection, sore throat, sneezing, malaise, etc. Yeah, I wouldn't go somewhere where I thought I would catch one of those really bad versions. Call it fear, call it prudence.
My concern is that when the virus becomes endemic in the Middle East, that it will become a breeding ground and a more deadly strain would develop. Unfortunately I don't have sufficient knowledge to make an educated guess as to the likelihood of such a development.
It wouldn't be long before everyone would know someone who has died from it and it could develop a higher mortality rate in the future.
All of which are good things. The overheated stock market needs some cooling off, borders need to be controlled again, and the supply chains need to be made less dependent on China. Good, good, good. How ironic that it takes a China-made virus to push us in that direction.
I don´t think I "advocated economic decline", where did I say that? However, you are correct that capitalism inherently requires endless growth and expansion, which of course is a problem in a limited system. There are lots of ideas about how to address this, it would be different topic.
Economic shrinkage = economic decline, in our current capitalist system. The wealth we had been enjoying before the sub prime mortgage crash was built on a vast bubble. The world economy has been staggering along since and the chaos of populism sweeping the world at the moment, oh and not to mention the pandemic, economic decline is pretty much inevitable at the moment.
Happy?
I think you are confusing short term and long term trends. A correction in overheated economy is a good thing, that is what the Corona thing brings, that is a good thing.
Quoting Punshhh
The bubble is still there, and will eventually need to be deflated..[/quote]
Quoting Punshhh
The much maligned (by the so-called mainstream media) populism is a reaction the elitist globalism that has been sweeping the world and is a healthy reaction. Do you seriously want to live in the globalist world envisioned by the likes of George Soros?
Quoting Punshhh
A much-needed correction, not a decline, if you talk about economics. You can not have continuous expansion without corrections.
Well our country is still reeling from the correction in 2008. Following 10 years of fierce austerity, most of our local and district councils and public services are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Unless you're in the top 5 - 10% in terms of wealth it feels like 10 years of steady biting economic decline.
If we get, or need any other correction now, we will begin to feel widespread economic collapse.
We really don't need a rightwing populist government right now. Who are going to bash the poor some more. Not to mention one which is going to drive us of a cliff with Brexit.
Yes, we really do need some cooling off right now.
Are you writing from an alternative universe? Your government budgets have expanded over the last 10 years, that is certainly not "fierce austerity". And "local and district councils and public services" can never go "bankrupt", since they are funded by tax money. Maybe what you want to say is you wish taxes here higher.
Quoting Punshhh
Stock markets are too high, and need a correction. However, a stock market fall is not the same as an "economic collapse".
Quoting Punshhh
I don´t know what you mean by "bash the poor", and I certainly do not see how "Brexit is driving us of a cliff". It is not the end of the world, when a country leaves the undemocratic EU project. In fact, the best countries in Europe are not members of the EU.
Where do you get these talking points from?
Oh now I get it. You are writing from the UK? Well, congratulations to Brexit! Surely you don´t think that being a subject of Merkels empire is better than having your own country?
What is?
You realise do you not, that the pandemic you are in favour of could kill 1-2% of the population before a sufficient vaccination plan is in operation?
I suppose you are also in favour of a correction in population.
These doctors were apparently as effective as they looked.
No, I did not list the mortality rate as one of the positive things. Obviously I am sympathetic to any victim. Please try to just respond to what is written, instead of "supposing" too much.
What is that supposed to mean?
I can see you try to be insulting, but do you have an actual point?
You have nailed the economic problem; Production and trade will suffer -- which is understandable. IF you thought that 1% or 2% of the attendees at a big sporting event were going to be shot, you wouldn't attend that event. This is a new disease, so people are double-plus nervous about it. Most people will be inconvenienced at most, if they get sick. Younger, stronger, healthier people won't die very often, or maybe even get very sick. Us old folks should be sure our wills are in final form. I haven't written one yet, so I guess I had better get cracking.
We'll just have to wait and see.
As far as the stock market goes, the ups and downs of speculation are kind of hocus pocus anyway; investors are regularly reported to be spooked or goosed by one thing or another. Like, "the markets are down owing to investor jitters over a report about the Vatican's rodent infestation" or some damn thing. I generally discount that stuff; it sounds too much like fortune telling.
Are you positive about this?
Source? Because if you're right it saves me money on buying or not buying a mask..
Last week on a shuttle ride to LAX we were talking to a couple of government health agents (CDC? I don’t recall exactly) deployed there and they confirmed this. They said a mask would have to have a perfect seal and of a more effective design than the cloth or paper ones.
Nevertheless, in Honolulu about 20% of all the Asian tourists you see have these masks on, and business in Chinatown is down by about 15-30%. I think that I read that’s the case for all Chinatowns.
[i]Surgical Masks
Surgical masks are used as a physical barrier to protect the user from hazards, such as splashes of large droplets of blood or body fluids.
Surgical masks also protect other people against infection from the person wearing the surgical mask. Such masks trap large particles of body fluids that may contain bacteria or viruses expelled by the wearer.
Surgical masks are used for several different purposes, including the following:
Placed on sick people to limit the spread of infectious respiratory secretions to others.
Worn by healthcare providers to prevent accidental contamination of patients' wounds by the organisms normally present in mucus and saliva.
Worn by workers to protect themselves from splashes or sprays of blood or bodily fluids; they may also keep contaminated fingers/hands away from the mouth and nose.
Surgical masks are not designed or certified to prevent the inhalation of small airborne contaminants. These particles are not visible to the naked eye but may still be capable of causing infection. Surgical masks are not designed to seal tightly against the user's face. During inhalation, much of the potentially contaminated air can pass through gaps between the face and the surgical mask and not be pulled through the filter material of the mask. Their ability to filter small particles varies significantly based upon the type of material used to make the surgical mask, so they cannot be relied upon to protect workers against airborne infectious agents. Only surgical masks that are cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to be legally marketed in the United States have been tested for their ability to resist blood and body fluids.[/i]
https://www.osha.gov/Publications/respirators-vs-surgicalmasks-factsheet.html
Meow!
GREG
Shouldn't that be 10-20,000 deaths per million, (i.e. 1-2%)?
Yes, large sporting events will be some of the first gatherings to be cancelled, the Olympics in Japan for example. Also we have parts supply chains from Chinese manufacturers starting to fail. There will be lots of knock on effects. It's going to become endemic in regions like the Middle East, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Vietnam etc, and Africa. So these regions will become no go areas until an effective vaccine is available, if that is even possible.
I take your point about the stock market, but what if they perceive impending doom, with no short term recovery?
Sorry about that. The most familiar stat form is deaths per 100,000, live births per 100,000, etc.
Wait a minute: How can one of the flimsy paper face masks help prevent spreading contagion from the infected to the uninfected, but not the reverse?
My impression is that the typical paper mask is not terribly effective in protecting people and patients from each other. What the masks can stop is droplets of bodily fluid large enough to be snagged by the product; it won't stop very fine droplets or aerosolized sprays of fluid.
One thing the masks do is discourage people from touching some parts of their face, like their mouth and nose, with fingers which can collect bacteria or contaminants from environmental surfaces. Frequent hand washing also reduces transmission from the hand to mucus membrane (nose, mouth, eye...).
Highly effective masks cost waaaay too much money to hand out for free to all and sum. If you are really worried, you can shell out some money and get an effective one, and wear it all the time you are out in public.
People find things like masks reassuring or comforting, which might make them worthwhile for peace of mind (even if not really effective).
Perhaps because the mask isn't just paper?
Perhaps it is the design of the mask being put together in three layers that has an inner layer for moisture absorption, a middle layer as a barrier for germs and an outer layer designed with a fluid repellant allowing fluids not to be exhaled?
https://www.chp.gov.hk/files/pdf/use_mask_properly.pdf
Quoting Bitter Crank
Considering that this disease is a respiratory disease, a mask that holds in fluid (basically trapping the virus inside the human host, but not at all preventing it from entering the respiratory tract of that same potential host) and will increase heat in the respiratory tract.... well that's just what the virus needs to accelerate it's growth giving it a huge advantage over one's immune system. Oh... how a virus just loves warm and moist (like Savannah Georgia in August)... if I'd anthropomorphize the virus I'd imagine it wishes we'd all wear such masks and saying "thank you, your compliance for seeking out a feel good placebo will be rewarded... possibly by death".
That "worthwhile peace of mind" may indeed end up as "rest in peace"... as one should have trusted science instead of impressions as a comforting illusion.
To draw another analogy, surgical masks are to the preventing the coronavirus from infecting a healthy individual during an outbreak as school desks are in preventing radiation poisoning in humans in the event of a nuclear attack. ;)
Meow!
GREG
I don't think I need to add anything to this, I suppose.
No, you don´t.
Hope all is going well with you, MOS.
Live viruses, being obligate intracellular parasites, are always moist -- maybe not always warm. They don't do well outside of cells. Some naked viruses are durable, most aren't.
As for masks, the masks that hospitals here hand out are accordion-folded paper with maybe some other fiber mixed in to add a bit of strength. Once they get wet (like when outside in the cold, with lots of condensation inside the mask) the paper starts to fall apart.
The blue molded 3M masks which I used to use when running in the winter, don't get soggy, but they are also somewhat stiff, so they don't fit around the mouth quite as snugly, unless one is careful about putting them on. Not having a beard helps.
There are multi-layered masks available which range in price over dimes apiece, and of course nobody is going to hand those out quite so freely. I would guess the 4-layered masks probably offer some substantial protection both ways.
Then there are the heavy duty masks.
In the end, though, respiratory viruses are hard to hide from. One can't always wear a mask (practically, anyway) and unless one is observing hospital-grade infection control procedures, sooner or later airborne disease will find a way into one's inner sanctum, and one will just have to deal with it.
Apparently only 12 of >100 public health labs are able to test because of a problem with tests from the CDC. They're waiting on new ones. They are not allowed, for some bureaucratic reasons I don't understand, to make their own, though they say that they could quickly do so if allowed.
I don't want to sound too conspiratorial, but what the heck is going on here? None of the other affected countries seem to be having any trouble at all administering tests.
(related: My roommate just arrived home yesterday from his vacation in Hokkaido, which has recently become a major nexus of transmission. :-/ )
It is not "conspiratorial" to have those thoughts in the US these days. It is prudent! Some people have worried that China is not being forthcoming with figures because of its possible impact on President Xi. We ought be even more worried about whether the US will be forthcoming with figures, because Trump seems much more interested in the possible impact of the numbers on his re-election bid...than their use by the rest of the world for containing the possible epidemic.
Worse than being spoiled is that they won't do physical work. In the UK, the government is telling us that now they are going to stop seasonal low paid workers from coming in from the EU, our own young and inactive workers will have to be trained to pick fruit and vegetables and care for old people in care homes. They just won't do it. The government is incompetent though, which I expect you knew already.
I don't think any country will be able to prevent the epidemic spreading through their population. They might be able to slow it. But they don't want to shut their borders, which is what they will need to do.
Agreed!
This will be a bad one. Not the final one...not the end of humanity or anything like that. But it will be a huge kick in humanity's ass.
Maybe it will wake us up. Maybe we will continue to be jerks and only deal with crises when they are upon us.
Yes, hopefully we will wake up. I think the younger generation are ones who can see the challenges. Most of the older generation are either hiding their heads in the sand or reverting to a world view from about 50 years ago. This inertia has always been our downfall, turned opportunity into malaise, or stubborn defiance of change. Well change will be thrust upon us now.
Preliminary calculations for the average number of infections that each infected person may go on to cause, known as R0. This is estimated to be 2.0 to 3.0 people per infected person. In comparison to seasonal flu, which usually has an R0 of around 1.3.
The World Health Organization accounced on February 24, 2020 that the fatality rate in Wuhan, China, considered the epicenter of the outbreak, is between 2% and 4%. Outside of Wuhan, it is thought to be closer to 0.7%. In a recent JAMA paper The overall case-fatality rate was 2.3%, No deaths occurred in those aged 9 years and younger, but cases in those aged 70 to 79 years had an 8% fatality rate and those aged 80 years and older had a fatality rate of 14.8%. No deaths were reported among mild and severe cases. The fatality rate was 49% among critical cases, and elevated among those with preexisting conditions: 10.5% for people with cardiovascular disease, 7.3% for diabetes, 6.3% for chronic respiratory disease, 6% for hypertension, and 5.6% for cancer.
Country Cases Deaths
China 78,824 2,778
South Korea 2,337 13
Italy 881 21
Other 705 5
Iran 388 34
Japan 228 4
Singapore 93 0
Hong Kong 94 2
US 62 0
France 57 1
Germany 48 0
Kuwait 45 0
Thailand 41 0
Taiwan 34 1
Bahrain 36 0
Malaysia 23 0
Australia 23 0
United Arab Emirates 19 0
UK 20 0
Spain 32 0
Vietnam 16 0
Canada 14 0
Macau 10 0
Switzerland 8 0
Iraq 7 0
Croatia 5 0
Israel 4 0
Oman 4 0
India 3 0
Philippines 3 1
Austria 3 0
Greece 3 0
Romania 3 0
Russia 2 0
Lebanon 2 0
Pakistan 2 0
Algeria 1 0
Afganistan 1 0
Azerbaijan 1 0
Belarus 1 0
Belgium 1 0
Brazil 1 0
Cambodia 1 0
Denmark 1 0
Finland 1 0
Georgia 1 0
Iceland 1 0
Lithuania 1 0
Mexico 1 0
North Macedonia 1 0
Norway 1 0
Nepal 1 0
Netherlands 1 0
New Zealand 1 0
Northern Ireland 1 0
Nigeria 1 0
San Marino 1 0
Sri Lanka 1 0
Egypt 1 0
Estonia 1 0
Sweden 7 0
Total 84,119 2,867
I don't know if you realize the pun you uttered.
Yup!
The spread in China seems to be slowing down, which may be a sign that the preventative measures are having an effect. Granted, no european country is likely to enact similarly draconic measures, but everyone is now warned in advance. In that sense, the somewhat hysterical media reporting might end up being helpful, slowing the spread significantly.
What about the cases that cropped up with no known connection to infected population. In far away places. Italy, the USA even. The virus may be spreading also outside of human-to-human contact.
This may be scary, but the fatality rate is only two percent. That is very low. We are panicing for no known reason.
I think the most likely explanation is that people with very light symptoms didn't realize they had anything other than a common cold and traveled.
That's another thing to consider concerning both the confirmed cases and the mortality. A lot of people may have had only very light symptoms that went away on their own. That makes the virus a lot harder to contain, but at the same time might mean the mortality is lower.
I don't see it as hysterical ( that may be the media I watch), the hysteria spreads readily. I live a long way from the nearest case of the virus and already I find myself modifying my behaviour, I was in my local supermarket today and people were clearly panic buying (discretely), including myself. And this in a country of 66 million and only 23 confirmed cases. Basic food stuffs had nearly sold out. Imagine what it will be like when there are a few thousand, or hundred thousand cases.
I'm preparing for the point where the country is locked down and we are all told to stay home for a few weeks, or months. I know it is not certain that this will happen, but better to be prepared.
It will soon have a foothold in many countries without the adequate resources to prevent it becoming endemic. This means that in future travel will have to be severely limited, if we are to keep some countries free of the virus. Also we don't know how effective any vaccines are going to be.
I still don't, where is it?
But there are far more cases than with SARS and MERS. The Corona death toll is now more than those two combined.
I think the big question is how much modification of behavior is warranted. There are a bunch of fairly simple methods which are effective at reducing the virus's spread. As long as people who have symptoms and are in an area where the virus is already known limit their contact with other people as much as possible and everyone else follows strict hygiene, it will probably remain manageable.
Limited prevention measures are also easier to keep up long term. If it takes until the end of the year for an effective vaccine to be developed, we'll probably have to deal with repeated waves of the virus as it keeps being re-introduced into areas. A complete shutdown isn't feasible for such a scenario.
You used the expression "decadence" for the soft, rotting core of society, which has become soft and you know, soft, like soft, yellow shit.
But "decadence" actually means in its original sense, in French, "Death, dying, the dying process".
That is true. But the death rate is still only two percent. It can stay two percent until two percent of all infected people die. It's still two percent. The absolute number of deaths grow while it remains at two percent of all infected people as the population of infected people grow.
I don't know what is so hard to understand about "two percent". Must be the effect of North American Populist Stupid Fundamentalist Evangelist Christian Schoolboards' stupid decision to not teach anything useful in school.
Nothing hard about it. But you were talking about panic. Two percent or twenty can be the same deaths depending on sample size of those infected. It's the total deaths that people might panic about.
Two percent isn't low. I'd say flu's 0.1% is low.
Well, at the risk of sounding like an uncaring ass, I just want to defend @god must be atheist's point for a bit (correct if me if what I am saying has nothing to do with your point).
If 2% of the population of every country on earth died TOMORROW following the pattern of coronavirus deaths...it seems it would slightly HELP the world's economy (per capita)? Please correct me where wrong (I am interested, and open to the idea that I am very wrong here). It seems most of the 2% will be retired people. So it is just the sadness, trauma, and FEAR that will truly be a problem. FEAR will lead to shutting down of boarders or people not going to work. If the world economy significantly slows, far more than 2% will die as a result over the coming decades.
I accept your answer as your opinion. Since we have not established any metrics as to what constitues low, I have no choice to accept your answer as true for you, and you have no choice but to accept that for me two percent is low.
Once we get into other discussions, such as how high a mortality rate affects the economy, education, law, (such as riots starting) and distribution of everyday necessaries, as well as spiritual upheaval, etc etc then we can talk about it more intelligently.
But two percent is not high in my esteem, as the world doubles its population every 40 years, so it is near an annual two-percent increase year-over-year. It hasn't hurt the economy, so a reduction of the same rate ought not hurt the economy either.
Why do you say it's not low? To me 50% would be high, and 80% would be high. Two percent is pittance, compared to 50% and 89%.
I both agree and don't. There will be more mullah and goods to go around per capita; a 2% increase in a flash. The upfall is also that retired, i.e. conventionally and economically non-contributing members go out; that way the production is at a steady rate, and relative wealth will grow.
It is true that fear may induce public panic. Stores will be ransacked. No food available. Farmers refuse to truck their stuff to town. Massive starvation, manier people die from malnutrition, than from New Coronavirus. STealing, and eating other people's loved pets becomes a fashion, and cannibalism is not out either, if things get really bad.
The funeral home industry will strive. So will the doomsday prophet industry. Doomsday prophets and street preachers have been industriously preaching the end of the world, I think since the world began.
I'm getting hungry just re-reading what I've so far written. Cheers, off to the kitchen.
Ay-vey.
Thanks, I get it now. There was a part of me thinking something along those lines.
Regarding the 2%, I agree with your view that it is a low mortality rate. The problem is that in our modern societies allowing 2% of the population to die without trying to prevent it is anathema. So we will commit economic hari kari and probably still loose 2%.
Right. I concur. Except now I have to look up "anathema" and declare some sort of pun about it, too, to remain consistent.
Yep.
The thing is, it simply is a no-brainer for the governments to treat an epidemic with all-out measures once the media hype has set in. Just why would they dare to say "Nah... even if it's a more potent flu epidemic than the usual seasonal flu epidemics, we won't bother." What on Earth any politician would benefit from saying that? And if there is a tiny statistical possibility that the coronavirus becomes something like the "Asian Flu" of the 1950's or the "Hong Kong Flu" of the 1960's, it would be political suicide for some politician to have said "Nah, these viruses come and go" if the death toll rises to several thousand one country.
And when epidemics can be contained with global cooperation and modern medicine, why wouldn't be contained? The fact is that actually we would have had pandemics like the "Spanish Flu" if it wasn't for modern responses. And if the media gets the chicken little's of the World to follow their reporting, why wouldn't they continue as they do?
The global economy takes a little bump, but it will recover.
I don't buy the arguments that we should stop looking at the most negative aspects or that we should not ignore human ingenuity and resiliency. Tell that to yourself or to someone who is actually affected. On recovery, I don't see this bright sunshine rosy thing, I just see how miserable life can be. Why put more people into that possibility and/or inevitability? If you've ever had constant vomiting/diarrhea for more than a few days.. existence does not become that much brighter because it ended eventually. If you have a sudden bought of pneumonia and shortness of breath, making it through isn't shrug and go "isn't that funny about life?". Even common sore throats, runny noses, and general achiness doesn't make the cut as "just the cost of living".
Why put more people into that? Because they can climb mountains, read poetry, be a part of "nature", and whatever else generic sentimental bullshit we like to throw in as the payoff? Get the hell out of here.
@god must be atheist
@Janus
@Nils Loc
@ZhouBoTong
@Punshhh
@Frank Apisa
Catch 22. Shutting of borders will lead to economic depression if not collapse, shortages of not just cheap consumer items that might be thought to be inessential, but also shortages of food, fuel, essential components of industry, medical care, medications and so on.
On the plus side a great depression or collapse might contribute towards ameliorating the effects of carbon emissions.
Take a look at the top two statistics (comparing deaths this year from Covid-19 and seasonal influenza) on this site
Thanks, that is a very useful site. Of course, then that asks how many of the seasonal influenza deaths were preventable with the proper care which would not stop Covid-19. Data we will never have.
You cant trust Data coming out of China. From countries with more reliable information, we know that the mortality rate for Corona is about 2%, while that for normal influence is about 0.1%. Ergo, the Chinese Corona is about 20 more deadly. NOT the same.
I'm in the .2% risk pool if these rates aren't entirely nonsense. They say a majority of Chinese males smoke and this may exacerbate the the death rate since viral pneumonia is the principle killer.
That has not been established; estimates currently range between .7% and 3 %. The mortality rate outside China has been, so far, much lower than China's mortality rate. China's mortality rate may be much lower than it appears if they have been under-reporting the number of infections, and accurately reporting the number of deaths.
It is a catch 22, where do we turn?
Hopefully a cure all vaccine will be produced, but that may take more than a year and then God knows how long to administer it. Also it may mutate and the vaccine might not be very effective.
Perhaps this is the corner we turn towards the fading out of our civilisation.
Yes and it might sober us up a bit, from this drunken populist malaise.
How about part of the response is not having children?
Two percent is about the same mortality rate as the Spanish flu (I don't know where the 20% figure came from), which killed about 30 million people by the time it ended. The coronavirus has a similar infection rate as the Spanish flu. However, as has been quoted here, its mortality may be overestimated, and its infection rate may go down as well if we make the best effort to contain it. But the "nothing to worry about" attitude certainly isn't going to help in that.
I sympathise with your sentiment, but it is not that simple. Say some regions do that and their enemies don't then their enemies will overpower them in the future. Also there is the demographic problem of an aging population not being supported by younger people.
I think some kind of managed reduction in population is the way forward. However what is more likely that we will have an unmanaged, unplanned reduction.
Oddly enough children don't seem to be affected much by this virus.
Quoting Janus
Well, the coronavirus is more of a media pandemic than any kind of actual cataclysmic event. Until the next media fear gets into high gear I suppose.
And more deadly flu epidemics haven't had an effect on GDP growth: World economy grew at a rate of something like 5% in 1968-69 when the Hong Kong flu killed 1 million people around the World.
Why the content-less name-calling? Janus simply pointed out a fact. Carbon emissions being a direct reflection of economic activity, a reduction of economic activity BY DEFINITION means a reduction of carbon emissions. There is nothing to argue here.
Populations in Western countries ARE already reducing themselves. Look at the birth rates. However, our politicians want to change that by massively importing high-fertility populations from the 3rd world, in order to reverse that trend. (While at the same time bleeting about needing more taxes to reduce carbon emissions.)
Go figure.
Like TDS?
Are you sure that is the motive?
There can be other motives of course (think cheap labour big capital, cultural disembedding etc etc), but replacement population is obvious and often directly mentioned.
I.e. see on the UN page: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/ageing/replacement-migration.asp
Not exactly a secret.
TDS is not name-calling. If you think the Trump Derangement Syndrome is not a real psychological phonemenon, you are probably caught in it.
Like population growth is the basic and natural reason for economic growth?
And that decrease in the size of the economy (zero or negative growth) means an economic depression, which means extremely angry voters in the next elections and current politicians losing their jobs?
Not very hard to figure out.
Interesting publication.
Quoting Nobeernolife
I can not find any evidence of that. It's not in the DSM. But this is not the thread for that conversation. But thanks for the assumption that I'm deranged. Of course, that's not name calling either is it?
I haven't said it is a cataclysmic event, but it could well be thought of as one if it becomes established as a seasonal virus with both an infection and a mortality rate much higher than the seasonal flu and when the likely economic effects which will manifest if it becomes so are taken into account.
Also past economic effects at times of genuine economic growth are not reliable guides to probable future economic effects when the fact that there is no real economic growth today, but merely the semblance of growth created by burgeoning credit, is taken into account.
True, simplistic analyses are easy.
Only if seen from the very narrow viewpoint of manufacturers looking for a growing market. Not for the country as a whole. Otherwise, please explain why the places with the highest population growth are typically proverbial sh1tholes, while the population the most developed countries is shrinking.
And this is of course the reason for there to be the media frenzy. The real question is how probable the possibility of a pandemic is.
For example, you can still get the bubonic plague in rural US and even if it can be treated by antibiotics, the overall mortality rate is something like 11% (hence the killer is still far more deadlier than the corona virus). Plague still gets sometimes into the news if there are multiple infections. But it's contained.
Malaria kills a lot of people even today, but anybody understands that going to a country with malaria without starting to eat anti-malaria pills is just stupid. We have already seen a large ebola outbreak (which a lot of medical people were worried about before it happened) and yet it didn't cause a pandemic. So hence the argument can be made that a) modern medicine, b) global cooperation in preventive measures and c) global communication in the internet age really broken the back of deadly pandemics?
Just think of the case if we would have deaths similar to the Hong Kong flu of the 1960's.
If the death toll would reach 1 million, what do you think the media response would be?
Quoting Janus
I think that many times these things are used as simple scapegoats to hide normal economic fluctuations. But if huge quarantines are imposed, the economic consequences are obvious.
I see this actually in a positive light. We still cherish human life so much that we do let it get in the way of business and the economy.
A bit off the topic, but I'll try to answer. The answer is no.
Firstly, the simple and historically quite proven fact is that with growing prosperity fertility rates plunge. In the poorest countries having a lot of children is the basic (hopeful) guarantee that at least somebody is going to take care of you when you are old and cannot work, hence you don't have to become a beggar. Not so in more prosperous countries. Hence high fertility rates show actually how poor the countries are.
Secondly, it's not just the manufacturers, it's the governments themselves. Decrease in the population is not only a genuine cause for low economic growth, but also it makes a huge problem for the present welfare system. Just look at Japan. Or basically any rural community where there are just old people around and no children going to school. And the hopes of governments that want their population to grow are quite down to Earth. The rates governments are happy about is fertility rates of 2,1+, not of 5.
Because with a perpetual fertility rate less than 2, well, you can estimate when the last humans simply die away from existence in this World. Perhaps that's the pipe-dream of the anti-natalism lunatics...
I know all of this, and I know economists and politicians fall into this shallow line of thinking.
Basing economic growth on an ever growing population is a fools game. Yes, more consumers mean bigger markets, but they also mean more need for jobs, more demand for government services, more load on the environment, more pollution, more imports, more ressource consumption, more, more more. Just how many more millions do you want to add to the 120 that already occupy the relatively small area of Japan? How much more population does Hong Kong need?
On the other side, how about the economic success of high-birthrate places like the Congo, Haiti? Continue the list as you wish.
Yes, the population imbalance created by a shrinking population is a problem. But what governments should aim at is a stable population (birthrate about 2) and not an massively growing population.
Clearer?
Firstly I wasn't aware that I was having an argument with Janus. Secondly, I'm not a eugenicist, I'm discussing the effects and efforts to combat coronavirus.
I can't see anyway to avoid it becoming globally endemic. The only way we are to avoid this is through effective vaccination, which will take over a year and to administer it widely will take a long time.
It is not clear which is the cause and which is the effect though. Also, there is no consistent correlation... Birthrate in Israel is 3.1 and in Saudi 2.6, both of which is well above replacement level. And these are wealthy countries.
Quoting ssu
True. However, I still call this shallow thinking. And you can see the disastrous result of e.g. the EU policy of importing masses of third world migrants straight into the European welfare systems, where, instead of solving the pension problem, they increase it.
What government aims for massively growing population I'd ask? The last example was Ceausescu's Romania, and not only did that policy fail, but that dictatorship has long past gone.
And typically any policies implemented have the objective of just what you said above: to curb the negative population growth, have at least a stable population, if not mildly growing. Good example of this is, just to give one example, the Danish state:
Singapore might be the best example of how wrong policies using linear forcasts can be. Singapore earlier feared that it would have a population crisis and took drastic measures to curb population growth. The crisis never came and now the government implements policies to get Singaporeans to have more babies. The theory of Demographic Transition is quite old, proposed in 1929 by Warren Thompson, yet has been a good model, but not used or understood. As typically happens, the model was brushed aside with far more popular forecasts predicting out of control population growth.
Doom and gloom sells.
Firstly, Ebola is far more deadlier. Fatality rate is about 50%. It was the thing, before the West African Ebola outbreak of 2013-2016, that many virologists worried about. Well, that amounted to 28 600 infections and 11 000 deaths.
But think of the response already and what it would be in the case of dramatic growth in infections, Benkei.
How many infections in let's say Belgium would make the Dutch authorities to seal off the border? Or the other way around? Belgium has now I think one infection. The Netherlands I guess 10. Let's take here a comparison of a true deadly pandemic: in two weeks of it's emergence of H3N2 in Hong Kong in 1968 roughly about half a million had been infected in Hong Kong. Covid-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2 virus was first detected last December and the infections confirmed is below 100 000 world wide.
The thing is, if infections started to rise to the level of H3N2 pandemic in let's say Netherlands (meaning hundreds of thousands of infections), I would guess that quite quickly there would be a lock-down of the entire nation. And we would know about it in minutes after the decision would be made.
Sorry, but I think that this coronavirus epidemic will at worst be perhaps in the category of Swine flu of 2009. So that's bad, but it isn't anything like what we are afraid with a pandemic. Swine flu killed a little below 20 000 people with 6 million infected. We did live past the 2009 Swine flu, just as we did live the Ebola outbreak. And I think the reasons why none of these came to be similar incidents as the Black Death, the Spanish Flu or even H3N2 is because the reasons I mentioned earlier.
Quoting Punshhh
Simple containment procedures and people washing their hands works also, actually. And a global epidemic is called a pandemic. Our interconnected World makes influenza epidemics quite easily pandemics. The lethality of these pandemics has gone down a lot.
Swine flu killed 150,000 - 575,000 people with 700 - 1,400 million infected. It had a case fatality rate of 0.01 - 0.08%.
Let's hope that COVID-19 with its 2% case fatality rate doesn't spread like the Swine flu, eh? That'd be 20 million dead.
The Swine Flu had a mortality rate of .02% and an R0 of 1.2 to 1.6. It's not at all comparable with Covid-19. Covid-19 has an estimated mortality rate of 50 to 100 times higher and currently the R0 of Covid-19 is estimated at 2.2. Covid-19 is both more deadly and more contagious than the Swine Flu. So again, I think you're underestimating the risk a bit here.
On a final note, my parents and my wife's parents are in an at-risk age category, with a case fatality rate of 8% and my dad in particular has a chronic respiratory disease, which increases it by another 8%. So that's 16% chance for my dad, which is too high for my liking.
I'm not expecting world-shattering consequences from this virus. But it should definitely be taken more seriously than SARS or Swine Flu.
For perspective: the lower bound with this conservative estimate is the equivalent of the entire population of the Netherlands.
Holy MacKarel, you are a genius!! Not only can you tell that .001 goes 20 times into .02, but you can also tell that .001 <> .02.
I admire you for your superior math skills. Do you have a Ph.D. in math, perchance, from some better university?
Very funny. So you disagree that Corona has a higher mortality rate than the seasonal flue?
EU governments are, as are the US democrats. By promoting unlimited 3rd world immigration, as also promoted by the UN. (See also UN "Compact for Migration" as signed our clueless globalist l eaders.
Just to point out the obvious.
I am in line generally with Kant's idea that people should not be used as a means if you can help it. Well, having children in order for them to take care of the elderly or having children to outpopulate your enemy is using children for a means. What is the cost of using people like this? The suffering person that will be born. Think of the suffering not how they can be used, or how much YOU think THEY should enjoy this or that part of life.
The point is that if there is something like Ebola in the world and physical diseases of all sorts known and as of yet unknown, who are we to throw more humans into that and cause more suffering?
Interesting differences in stat numbers. Of course these flues then stay around for years to come.
Quoting Nobeernolife
You're plain stupid. I did not say that. I agreed with you, and admired you for your superior math skills. You could't comprehend that, and therefore the proper conclusion to draw is that you're plain stupid.
Now, you may ask me how come your math skills are superior, and you're still stupid. C'mon, man, ask me already.
For those who want to read the actual thing instead of the xenophobic bullshit being peddled: New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants
Who's actually promoting unlimited 3rd world immigration now? Where are your "globalist leaders" preaching that anymore, I just ask. Things can change in 5-6 years, you know.
Doesn't look so at the Greek Turkish border now.
It's very unlikely that the case fatality rate is 2%. Most experts are guessing between 0.3 and 1% now, though there is large insecurity for the lower bound since it appears cases can go completely unnoticed.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
89,856 cases, 3,069 deaths.
3.415%
OK, it's even more than 2%.
Those are the raw numbers. But the actual infections are probably several times higher. Some say three times, some say 10 to 20 times. That's what I am reading in various newspapers anyways.
Sure, we could find a cure in which case the case fatality rate will drop significantly. But all we have to go on right now is the case fatality rate which is defined as the ratio of (known) deaths to (known) infections.
Right, I was referring to the mortality rate.
Seems reasonable :up:
Quoting god must be atheist
Hopefully it was the talk of stores without food that inspired your hunger and not the talk of cannibalism :yikes:
Hehe. I view cannibalism as a cross between cannabis and banalism.
But I don't condone it. Apparently the mad cow disease is caused by any species eating its own. This is actually a fact, I ain't joking. Or rather, not a fact, but how I remember what may have been a fact.
Quoting boethius - April 2018 - Re: Kavanaugh and Ford
The cuts started in 2018, as the White House focused on eliminating funding to Obama-era disease security programs. In March of that year, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, whose job it was to lead the U.S. response in the event of a pandemic, abruptly left the administration and his global health security team was disbanded.
That same year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was forced to slash its efforts to prevent global disease outbreak by 80% as its funding for the program began to run out. The agency, at the time, opted to focus on 10 priority countries and scale back in others, including China.
Also cut was the Complex Crises Fund, a $30 million emergency response pool that was at the secretary of state’s disposal to deploy disease experts and others in the event of a crisis.
[/quote]
A pandemic is probable if containment fails, which is itself likely due to at least the two facts that asymptomatic infected people are apparently infectious, and that countries are unlikely to close their borders and tell everyone to stay at home, because to do so would have devastating effects on the world's economies.
There are 94,170 cases and 3,219 deaths, putting the case fatality rate at 3.418%. However, 39,764 still have the disease, with 6,773 in serious or critical condition. If we just look at the 54,406 closed cases, there are 51,187 recoveries to the 3,219 deaths. Almost 6% of closed cases closed in death.
Essentially all the experts agree containment has failed and it's already a pandemic. Already a week or two ago some top experts predicting 70% of the world population catching the virus within 1 year.
That cases keep rising in South Korea, a relatively easy country to control borders and using as extreme quarantine and testing measures as they can, means there's basically no way to contain the virus. Hence, very predicable that containment has failed in Italy and is failing everywhere else.
Quoting Michael
It's not valid to conclude 6% because death closes a case much earlier than recovery, so statistically biases such a calculation towards death. Of course, you're correct that simply dividing the total cases by deaths is also not valid.
Furthermore, there can be lot's of mild cases that have gone undetected.
However, total cases and deaths is only part of the story even if we have accurate data (and trusting the Chinese and Iranian data, that make up most of the sample size to date, is simply unwise; the WHO takes it on face value for political reasons and not scientific reasons).
In the case of China, it can still be seen from space that their economy is not anywhere close "back to normal" as one would expect if they're only have on the order of a hundred new cases per day in a country of a billion people. Likewise, an even further crackdown on "spreading rumors" would not be needed; everyone would be on social media happy they aren't sick, containment in Wuhan worked and praising the party for saving the day.
Hence, the speculation is there is a full blown epidemic in all of China at this point.
Also remember China locked millions of people in their houses, there could be lot's and lot's of dead people just lying in their apartment (if the problems below occurred it's the easiest option ... then just fish them out slowly and claim they never existed).
The other hugely important statistic is the percent of people needing intensive care, in particular oxygen and respirators. There's only a limited amount of this equipment and, in particular respirators, require very intensive care, and even more intensive care when put in "best chance of survival mode" (that may require paralyzing the patient to avoid their breathing fighting the respirator).
Likewise, maintaining a quarantine effectively requires specialized equipment.
So, running out of treatment equipment means mortality rises and running out of quarantine equipment means lot's of health professionals get sick too (added to the likelihood of just getting it at home or out and about).
The fatality rate is an order or magnitude higher than the flue, the survival rate needing intensive care maybe 2 orders of magnitude higher than the flue, and the virulence maybe several factors higher than the flue (as high as 7, compared to 1.6 for the flue) and of course there's not a large portion of the global population that simply doesn't get the flue any given season (due to still having immunity from last seasons).
The virus may survive on surfaces up to 9 days (compared to 2 hours for the flue ... which means you can get this disease in the mail ... which in turn means if you test a Amazon warehouse you may find coronavirus, so you don't as to not make such a massive economic disruption so instead you just keep online the most efficient way to spread the virus exponentially through, perhaps low probability but super high impact, totally random infections that make entirely unexpected and unexplained clusters), incubation maybe as high as 3 weeks, it seems now highly likely asymptomatic carriers can spread the disease, and there's some evidence people can simply catch the disease again even once they have recovered.
All of the above is also complicated by the fact people will continue to need care for other things. This creates 2 issues. First, people come into the hospital for other reasons but happen to have coronavirus, transmit it to health workers who then transmit it to other patients and visitors in hospital for other reasons. When a place get's contaminated, they aren't disinfecting the entire place for no reason; it's just that bad in terms of persistence in the environment which quickly becomes an impossible task at a large scale. Second problem is that as health services are strained, people start dying from other things due to lack of care, so those people must be added as casualties of the pandemic. There is lot's of pneumonia anyways.
All this combines to create a complete global health catastrophe. Although there's already plenty of global health catastrophes due to poor policies, so what's one more, this one was likely preventable with policies previously in place, so is unfortunate in that regard.
Basically it's the mutabu virus, just played out in China with the US as a "don't place sycophant in charge" thematic sub-plot, and changing the main plot to preserve face rather than "the weapon" ... and infecting the entire world instead of blowing up a small town, is what I'm saying.
This may seem preemptively overly dramatic, but 700 million people are already in quarantine, self isolation or restricted travel in China, which is 10% of the global population and happened within the span of months; it's fairly reasonable to expect the same to happen to the rest of the globe within the next few months now that containment within China has completely failed and the rest of the world is where China was about 2 months ago.
The speed of this outbreak also means that it's unlikely the virus will lose much in lethality, as evolving to be less lethal as viruses normally do is an evolutionary process that takes time ... but such quick spreading doesn't create less strains than had it proliferated over a longer amount of time and so different strains may emerge that can infect people again (on-top of it, potentially being the case, that many can get the same strain again).
The only viable way to even slow down the virus significantly at this point requires basically shutting down the global economy. We're in the down-playing and denial phase from Western governments, in my opinion, to avoid pressure to take radical measures until it is too late for those to serve any purpose (as they calculate it's unavoidable anyways, no reason to harm the economy more than necessary in the process).
But then that would be no fun. :confused:
Really depends on age. A bad outcome radically increases with age ... which will also help spread the virus exponentially when the younger generations realize it's not a huge threat to them and need to go about their business at some point.
If you're young, main problem of travel is potentially being trapped in quarantine ... but Western governments seem to have decided to stop trying to maintain containment, but they may turn that policy on and off randomly for PR reasons.
The current plan seems to be to slow down the spread enough to delay the peak until summer, when warmer weather will make it easier to deal with.
I'm 31, which I'm going to say is young.
Yes, delay is the goal of the current policies of closing schools and banning large events.
However, unless policies are global and significant, such as shut all schools in the world, shutdown international travel, and maximize self quarantine and work from home ... there maybe little way to delay much now that containment has failed.
Also, it's completely unclear at this point if summer will abate the virus as summer does with the flue.
Delay is good anyways of course.
We seem right before the uncontrollable and exponential global growth phase. My guess is that the pattern that developed in Wuhan will repeat on a global scale but much worse as there's no way to take the radical measures China did on a global scale, but we will see if current or new policies are effective for slowing the virus globally in the next weeks.
Yes, it does seem that with proper care most critical cases survive. Though we have seen deaths can jump very high in a single day, so deaths could jump in Korea. There is a long phase where a patient can be kept paralyzed on a respirator with a slight chance of recovery, but if that equipment is needed for someone with a higher chance then it's time to pull the plug.
What's so worrisome to the epidemiologists is that there's a large percentage of cases that require such care, so where we'll see a lot of deaths is when health systems are overloaded and forced into triage.
It is suspected that deaths are very under-reported in Iran for instance. China we may never know.
So, yes, on the one hand, South Korea has managed to slow the Virus spread, but on the other hand they have not succeeded in containment (no one has) and they have taken high-effort, highly-disruptively extreme measures that other countries simply don's have the resources to do and many may not be willing to do (if the cat is out of the bag and travel just makes clusters pop up somewhere else as one cluster is being dealt with).
I have no doubt that if extreme policies where done globally, then we would probably have a manageable spread of the virus that wouldn't overload most health systems. But quarantining whole cities, massive testing, self-isolation, travel restrictions, no open schools, no large events, etc. is really a very high economic cost. If such measures don't even succeed in containment, likely economists are telling the politicians that "the value of peoples lives we're talking about (especially retired people that actually cost the public purse) is far lower than the economic disruptions". Which is why we're hearing on the corporate news, like Bloomberg, that "the economic disease can be worse than the actual disease".
Of course, Bloomberg and the economists are right, but only because of the structural precarity that capitalism places people under. If you want to govern based on the value of the stock market, it's needed from time to time to sacrifice large amounts of people on that flashy altar.
Under such a decision making framework, the correct response is to make more-or-less token measures and plan out the blame-game phase (cough-cough, Pence).
Once "you got a cough, don't come to work, be responsible, stay isolated!" turns to "you're not that sick, you need to come to work, everyone needs to work, I'll find someone else!", is when the floodgates open so to speak. Since containment has failed globally, this switch-over in pubic attitude will happen in a two or three months in my estimation (of course, in the US there's no switch to make as that knob is placed permanently on 'you need to work to survive'); the US also uses a lot of take-away food, which is run by young people who may get sick "but need to work", and people simply need to eat, so I expect takeaway will become a main vector in the US.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/coronavirus-maps.html
(Which you can see for free if you use firefox and turn off javascript)
With Sars, it would popup somewhere, containment would work really well, it would be hiding out and then popup somewhere else, containment would work. Whole process took months and months.
Whereas looking at this map, we went from "new disease in China, a lot of cases, some deaths, but containment is working" in January, to now cases all over the world and in the most advanced economies that have the best resources for containment.
It's like nothing that has ever been seen in the modern era; the virus has completely broken our containment policies, equipment, and practices. Once clusters start to overlap (spreading into each other), then even the "slow down" measures will no longer be effective (other than the "shutdown the global economy" option, which, from what I can see, the current policy is to not do that, just sit back and let it happen).
It really is an odd case. The virus seems to be harmless enough that it's unnecessary to worry about it on an individual basis if you're otherwise healthy. But it's dangerous enough that on a large scale, it will not only kill a significant number of vulnerable people, but also have negative side effects by overburdening systems and displacing other patients.
That it seems to be just on the boundary makes deciding on policy even harder.
Quoting boethius
Since we're unable to do anything about that short term, it does seem reasonable to not shut everything down. Especially since the symptoms are indistinguishable from a common cold, at least early on, so you really would have to shut down everything.
Yes, it seems to be the mathematically perfect virus to break our systems.
With Sars, Mers, and Ebola, I was actually wondering if pandemic viruses simply couldn't compete with the information age. It seems we have the answer.
Of course, had the previous pandemic expert not quit due to funding cuts and his team disbanded (the main guy in charge of stopping Sars, Mers and Ebola) ... then maybe Coronavirus would be just another in the list. Since China is a corrupt and incompetent political system, it actually depends on less corrupt pressure from the West for making key decisions. For instance, without more accurate data and pressure from the West, unlikely China would have started any programs to reduce air pollution (so had the Pandemic prevention team had the same funding to be "on the ball" in China, may would have played out very differently; what's clear is the Chinese officials in charge didn't know what they were dealing with; I expect a few Western pandemic experts in the mix would have reacted much faster).
Quoting Echarmion
Yes, it is the only choice in the current system, especially for the US that does not have social safety net policies and systems that can encourage more self-isolation for cough symptoms (such as the UK announcing today sick leave will be paid from day one; health care In Europe is free so few have the habit "of simply never going to the doctor" and few are in the position of "have to work, even to death, anyways, no choice" etc.). So, it will be a very interesting systems-analysis case to compare how things play out in Europe compared to the US after the pandemic (that one, among many, reasons to have a social safety net system is to have the institutions already in place to deal with these sorts of black-swan events).
[quote=Theguardian - 14 minutes ago]The UK response to coronavirus was already moving into its second “delay” phase, rather than seeking to simply “contain” the disease, Prof Whitty told British MPs.
“We have moved from a situation where we are mainly in contain, with some delay built in, to we are now mainly delay,” said Britain’s chief medical officer, although elements of the contain process would remain in place.[/quote]
Enough with the spamming.
Enough trolling. Youre not as sophisticated with the unnecessary swearing. Say something or be silent.
Yes interesting, with the UK transitioning form the high welfare provision of Europe to the low welfare provision of the US. The effects of the pandemic combined with the Brexit folly and a hard right populist government, the UK is going to go through a top to bottom crisis. The government are clowns with no grasp of what is going to happen over the next year. There will now be a succession of businesses going under, even today the Flybe airline went into administration. Also there are large numbers with no sickness provision living hand to mouth in what is known as the Gig economy. These people will have to keep working, often working with the public. Also there are large numbers of people who are two or three pay checks away from destitution.
The NHS is chronicly underfunded, in crisis and understaffed, with vacancies for 100,000 nurses. While the Prime minister says the health service is in great shape and ready for large numbers of poorly people if there is a pandemic. What a joke.
Actually China would have less problems than now it is facing if it didn't have the one-child policy back in the day. One disasterous policy I would say.
Prosperity is the best way to curb population growth and China has succeeded in it.
India didn't have any one-child policy or similar drastic measures and look how fertility has gone there:
All because of economic growth, emerging prosperity and the ongoing successful eradication of povetry.
And to the population growth, a corona virus won't mean anything. Even if a million died of it, you wouldn't notice it in the statistics.
Well, if we assume the Covid 19 infects about 20% of the world population within the next 2 years, and the mortality rate is 1%, that'd be 15 Million deaths, 7.5 Million a year.
Though, admittedly, at this point this is pretty much just guessing, it shows how significant even a virus that is relatively harmless to each individual can be.
Have you been living under a rock? Are you unaware of the ongoing mass migration, and the latest wave unleased by Erdogan just a few days ago? Greece has a nationalist government, so for now they are trying to hold the line. But Merkels and Macarons open invitation still stands. You probably did not notice that these globalist activists have also signed the "UN Compact for Migration" which fundamentally gives the whole 3rd world the unlimited right to migrate to the Western democracies.
An axiom of existence: the unpreventable cannot be prevented.
:lol:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Since 'already born' procreators are also sufferers;
and (2) since for many sufferers - if not most - "not procreating" increases their suffering;
and (3) since species auto-extinction, like personal suicide, neither eliminates the conditions that make suffering possible nor undoes/ameliorates any suffering already endured - i.e. nothing is prevented ex post facto;
and (4) since there are many viable and effective ways taught by e.g. Laozi/Zhuangzi, Buddha, Epicurus/Lucretius, Seneca/Epictetus, Spinoza, Zapffe et al (with which CBT & studies in 'positive' psychology are consistent) to further mitigate, even minimize, current suffering as well as prevent as much prospective (i.e. foreseeable) suffering as possible;
antinatalism - merely, at best, an auto-da-fé - is an idle 'solution' to the wrong problem, or pseudo-problem (pace "Silenus", Schopenhauer, Cioran, Benatar, Ligotti ... )
:death: :flower:
Eliminate patients instead of the viruses (or conditions that make them contagious) ... à la 'destroy the village in order to save the village' (Bên Tre, 1968) :roll:
More like cutting-off heads to treat migraines. Suffering (e.g. sickness, morbidity), schop1, is the problem, not living (i.e. procreating).
:mask:
:up: "... bring out your dead ..."
I agree with your analysis, and would only add that it is not only the volatility of the stock market but the complexity and fragile nature of global supply networks.
I say we should start the virus containment program by culling antinatalists. OK, it's not the most effective means to combat the epidemic, but it's something. And best of all, it will be easily the most welcome virus-containment measure of all. Since antinatalists' maxim is that living perpetuates suffering, they will all be in favor of their own extinction - not to mention everyone else around them. It's pure win!
Though my stockmarkatocracy mention was more aimed at how decisions are being made in the US (though also need to mention Trump has also worked out the essentials ... and, precociously, is already blaming Obama for the testing snafu), nevertheless the virus would not disrupt major supply chains ... of anything essential.
The virus doesn't destroy machinery and doesn't kill enough people that key skills would disappear. Most of what is produced is completely frivolous and not required in anyway, so maintaining critical production is not, from an engineering perspective, a big challenge.
Extreme measures to maintain containment, such as China has done definitely would slow the virus down; I don't believe their numbers but I do believe welding people into buildings and barricading streets and having the barest minimum outside interaction does slow the virus considerably.
Slowing the virus down means spreading cases over far more health care resources over time.
The reason things are being downplayed, and countries like the US and UK simply jumping from containment to "delay" (with token policies like banning large gatherings, which won't do much statistically) is, as far as I can see, is due to incompetence with the testing (total fiasco) as well as a reaction to the stock market crashes as well as a principled stand that the stock market index is more important than people's lives. What's best for the stock market is for everything to continue as usual and if 15% of old people die, tough luck for them.
However, the Western governments now, US in particular, really don't seem to understand how bad it's going to be. China also downplayed and lived in denial at first, but they did not then take extreme measures because denial turned out to be warranted and "it's not so bad". The only reasonable prediction to make is that Western governments doing exactly the same thing as happened in Wuhan (downplaying, keeping things "normal", until it's out of control) will result in the exact same outcome. There are tough decisions that could be made (and could have been made) that would slow the virus and make it easier for health care providers to deal with it, the fact of the matter is Western leaders, particularly the US, can stomach lot's of people dying unnecessarily more than they can stomach stock market index decreases. The interest rate changes happened very fast (no snafu's there), as that's where the priorities are. Trump is downplaying and saying it's just a mild flue and the numbers are wrong etc. in reaction to the stock market as if people believed it, even if it wasn't true, well then the stock market wouldn't mind a bunch of them dying if they kept calm and carried on; zero thoughts of the people that are and will be affected.
Bringing people out of existence through horrible disease is not part of the antinatalist agenda, sorry. Certainly being brought into existence exposes people all around the world to this though.
This is a dubious argument. When your supposed "suffering" is contingent on not getting to seriously affect someone else, then that suffering is not even a factor. I can't say something like "Oh, I am suffering so much because I don't get to force other people to do this or that". Nope.
Quoting 180 Proof
That I agree with you, but going forward, a potential that could suffer prevented by someone who might have a child, is still prevented. It's not about the aggregate but the margins. One person not suffering that could have, is one person not suffering that could have.
Quoting 180 Proof
If we need to mitigate, no reason to start the suffering. It's as simple as that. Let me provide you suffering on behalf/for you so you can deal with mitigating it later on is a non-starter in the realm of ethics.
Quoting 180 Proof
What pseudo-problem? No new person, no new suffering. If Mary and Joe do not have a child, no suffering will befall a new child from that union. Simple as that. No coronavirus for them to deal with, to be concordant with this thread.
Quoting 180 Proof
Eliminate the need to eliminate the virus by not having the patients in the first place. The patients already here have to deal with it (get the theme of "dealing with" here?).
Quoting 180 Proof
It is indeed the problem. If we know it exists, do not put more people in harms way. Having children is its own ideology- that of assenting to the way things are, and wanting to put another person into that way (pace my thread on society being an ideology).
You don't like him because he's the bully - but at least, in roughing you up, he throws you back into town, his town, where you can lick your wounds safely. You don't like him - but - he crystallizes everything perfectly. And that's a comfort.
It's a commensal , co-dependent relationship. And, like most abusive relationships, it repeats the same patterns, endlessly, while the participants speak endlessly about why it isn't abusive. It's actually so purely real, they say, you can't even understand.
Listen, I dated the same guy. It doesn't get better. Get out while you can. He's telling you what you want to hear, because it keeps you passive, and prevents you from developing an actual self. The more your autonomy wanes, the more you justify him to others. Eventually, it's compulsive. But you can still leave, any time.
The coronavirus isn't about The Big Problem of Suffering. Most things aren't!
This is a really good analogy. I interpret it this way:
People have become co-dependent with their suffering. It becomes necessary to living because if one cannot defeat it, or get away from it, the only thing people think they must do is embrace it and accept it. Thus, not only is suffering acceptable to oneself, but it is okay to create the (well known) conditions on someone else's behalf because somehow, they will (must) accept it too in order to deal with the mitigating circumstances of The Big Problem of Suffering.
Quoting csalisbury
But it is, and so are most things. Physical stress on your body is part of the abusive relationship. But one must accept it and continue it for others. No, we can break the habit of the abusive relationship and acceptance of it.
Which is why you should welcome the culling that I propose. I promise, it will be quick - not like dying from pneumonia. Or just kill yourself already and stop spamming the forum.
Quoting 180 Proof
Benatar's ethics is consequentialism. If living entails suffering then living doesn't cause suffering. Much in the same way that me killing a person doesn't cause his death, killing entails death. Or if I enter a room at noon, I don't cause someone to enter the room at noon.
So if the position is, suffering is intrinsic to life then it must necessarily fail as a consequentialist argument because living then does not cause suffering.
If the argument is that it is not intrinsic to life, then it becomes necessary to examine the causal chain. And then you run into problems because living is never a sufficient condition for suffering, merely a necessary condition.
:up:
Again, unnecessary trolling.
I do want to bring up, I am not necessarily using Benatar's version of antinatalism here, though I guess I'm obliged to defend it now being it is something I do generally agree with. But let's not mix what schopenhaer1 is saying with strictly what Benatar is saying. He has a pretty idiosyncratic form of antinatalism that I don't always use. That being said, have you actually read his arguments or are you just going by third-hand accounts?
Quoting Benkei
No one is saying that living causes suffering. However, no existence is so charmed as to not entail some suffering and thus for pragmatic argument's sake, semantically speaking, you can see why it becomes conflated in common parlance in these discussions (being suffering's ubiquitousness in all forms of living).
Quoting Benkei
Benkei, you have some interesting ideas, but this is a semantic argument, not a deep philosophical one. One can just make the move in this tit-for-tat game to remake the terms and keep the same substance of the argument. The position is suffering is entailed in (most life that we've ever known).. That's good enough then if living doesn't actually cause suffering. But who knows, maybe living does entail suffering. That is an intriguing idea to pursue. Buddhists believe it to be some sort of necessity, for example. It may be considered an illusion ultimately in this conception, but it is part of the doctrine in a fundamental way.
Also, Benatar isn't strictly a consequentialist. I actually see him more as a Kantian if we are to use the most widely used ethical categories. That is to say, he doesn't want to see people (the child) being used as a means to the someone else's (the parents') ends when it comes to generating the conditions for suffering for others (that is to say the necessary condition of life). Also he seems to say that there is an obligation not to cause the conditions of suffering, and not an obligation to cause happiness (if there is no actual person there in the first place). Thus, there seems to be an obligation around preventing suffering that is not purely about the consequences, but about obligations around suffering (and uniquely so, in the case of procreation where prevention of good affects no person so is not bad, and prevention of bad also affects no one, but is still good that no suffering occurred).
Quoting Benkei
This to me is really what you are trying to argue. For all intents and purposes, living is the cause of that which is inevitable- suffering. We have to define suffering of course. Certainly a life that has experienced an ounce of disease has some suffering. It is another argument, for example, as to how much disease, and how painful for this to be considered truly "suffering". But your argument is strictly about whether living is necessary and sufficient. The facts are that suffering is almost impossible to avoid while alive. The proof is simply seeing the suffering in almost everyone's life. No utopia exists, no paradise exists, etc. If Buddhism/Schopenhauer does have some truth to it, then perhaps there is a metaphysical aspect of animal striving that indeed would relate suffering with living itself. None of this needs to be consequentialism, in other words. Even if it was, the balance sheet is not on your side of the argument, if we are to use Benatar's argument. That is to say, if in the procreational decision, no actual person loses out on experiencing the good life that is not bad (as there is no actual person). However, not experiencing the bad of life is always good, even if there is no actual person to enjoy this good (see Benatar's asymmetry and formal argument written elsewhere to get full picture of his argument before you go by my rough outline of the argument).
Please have more response to my argument than that. I did provide a pretty detailed response and even though I generally disagree with your current argument, I think you elicit good debate. On an aside, I could swear I've seen you make (at least tepid) antinatalist arguments or at least have shown some sympathies for the arguments in the past. I could be mistaken though.
No dude, this is most certainly not a semantic issue.
You underestimate the importance of delineation. If one thing is intrinsically part of something, that one thing is not caused by the something. Water does not, by its mere existence, cause itself to be wet. Does living cause breathing? Does living cause a heartbeat? If you want to make an argument, your use of language must be sensible. So it's fundamental to decide whether living causes suffering (however remotely) or whether suffering is intrinsic to living. If the latter, then there is no argument to be had from an ethical point of view.
Quoting schopenhauer1
This makes no sense. I'm using non-existent people (which is in itself a contradiction in terms and therefore not intelligible)? Fine, that means I'm using nothing because non-existent (not that that can be a quality but whatever!). It's not Kantian, it's Konfused.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The fact that all living things suffer at some point in time, is not a valid argument to conclude that living is a sufficient condition for suffering so this does not resolve the causal chain. Living is simply not, and never will be, a sufficient condition for suffering. The disease causes suffering, being run over by a car causes suffering, a break up causes suffering etc. etc. Suffering is unique and particular.
The whole anti-natalist approach also ignores the fact that suffering is subjective, that all the research on human well-being shows almost everyone across cultures is well above neutral on happiness. So Benatar (and you) are simply empirically wrong about the experience of suffering in the world. The argument "yeah, but you really suffer more and are just deluding yourself" does not resolve the issue because if it's true the delusion is the experience and it's all about the experience.
And "not experiencing the bad of life" by not existing isn't "good" is the usual metaphysical mumbo-jumbo: We cannot ascribe ethical states to nothing.
Yes compadre, it is.
Quoting Benkei
You overmine it and are making a non-argument an argument.
Quoting Benkei
Living causes the conditions of suffering. See my post above about its inevitability and thus why its a non-starter what you're saying. If it was a poor unfortunate handful of souls that suffered in some odd foible of the universe, and everyone else lived some Edenic lifestyle, then you might have something more than a semantic argument. But that is not the case.
Quoting Benkei
OH here we go.. It is preventing.. "people from being used".. It is not preventing (non-existent) people...from being used. There is a difference. Think about it before you answer though.
Quoting Benkei
Again, if most (if not all) life has suffering, how is that not approaching sufficient enough, even if you think that it must be sufficient to cause suffering? Can there be human life without suffering? We can certainly try to imagine it, but that is in the imagination, not reality.
Quoting Benkei
Sure, but what lives don't have these particular cases? Extremely low, if any. In fact, because life entails some sort of strife to live, one can argue (barring arguments against induction, Hume style) that any life will have to have strife in order to live and thus some form of suffering.
Quoting Benkei
That is a bold assertion to say ALL the research shows... These are Benkei picked studies.. I can throw the opposite conclusion articles your way too.
Quoting Benkei
Again, have you actually read Benatar (in full)? We would do far better making this an actual book discussion if we are going to invoke his name and arguments. That way we are not just arguing our own second-hand points about Benatar.
Anyways, there is certainly many negative experiences in even an average human life. Diseases (being the topic of this thread) being one of many many many negative experiences. Why should a parent force their view of the world (that it should be lived out in its current conditions) by having a child who must then live this view of the world (that it should be lived out in its current conditions..lest suicide) out?
Quoting Benkei
This is the case again that you're not actually reading Benatar, so you get to debate a representative interpretation, as we aren't using the actual text. But, if I recall, he thought that it is absolutely good to not experience negative experiences/pain/suffering but relatively good to experience happiness. Then he gives some thought experiments. One if I recall was about how we wouldn't care if happy aliens don't exist on Mars. We would most likely feel sympathy if we found out aliens lived a tortuous painful life on Mars. Preventing pain is more important than generating good experiences in this conception because of these type of intuitions.
I'm sorry but you don't understand what causality is when you say "living causes the conditions..." It doesn't.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I'm reacting to what you wrote - not Benatar. And what you write is non-sensical. You're not preventing pain by not procreating because you're comparing a possible situation (people suffering) with nothing (nobody suffering), which is not a valid comparison. You're preventing suffering when you avoid the suffering of an actual person that would otherwise suffer. That's an actual comparison between possible states. It's that simple.
You can't handwave the whole post off with this cherry-picked quote. You have to read the part that it is an almost inevitability that suffering will occur..So I qualified it. Is sufficiency even an ISSUE? Does it have to be if all lives have it?? I think this is using a non-essential, non-starter argument against the suffering we are discussing.
Quoting Benkei
So shall we both agree to get a copy of Benatar's book before we go further since this is deeply involving his arguments?
Quoting Benkei
Living a life that suffers is not a possible state? It is pretty simple. Even if there is no one who exists, if there is a possibility that suffering can occur.. what then?
I think you mean philosophical spam. However, you are not doing philosophical trolling. You are just trolling. Anyways, Coronavirus in and of itself can be said to not be philosophical. I am at least trying to bring some philosophical themes involved. I think it is very relevant being that people will suffer from this, and antinatalism, if nothing else, revolves around the theme of suffering.
If you are going to handwave logical requirements for a valid argument because it's convenient for your preconceived conclusion, I'm fully in my right to handwave the entire post into the bin. Which I did.
Quoting schopenhauer1
What? You've never read Benatar?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Not what I said.
But I didn't handwave your arguments. I tried to answer them by questioning whether sufficiency matters when all lives have suffering (to some degree) that we have known of since the beginning of time.
Quoting Benkei
I had a copy of the book. I did read it years ago. I don't have it in my possession now, to my frustration as I constantly try to find bits of it online.
Maybe not, but it's what I'm trying to say.
If upon reading my arguments your first substantive sentence is "Living causes the conditions of suffering" then you're ignoring my arguments.
Upon pointing that out and your subsequent reaction is "I sufficiency even an ISSUE does it have to be if all lives have it?" then we're done.
Read up on sufficient and necessary conditions in a logical text book. For the love of God, please.
How is that ignoring your arguments? Its saying that living itself is not "sufficient" to cause particular cases of suffering, but it is necessary for the conditions for all these cases to occur. That is not ignoring anything.
Quoting Benkei
Yes, is it an issue? The conditions of suffering are necessary enough to contain the particular instances that cause suffering. Being that life usually has many of the instances, we don't need to talk about every single cause of an instance of suffering.
Yes. It is an issue. As I said before that every life has some suffering is no proof that it is a sufficient condition for particular suffering. I'm not even sure what to call this fallacy. For a sufficient condition "if P then Q" it means that the truth of P guarantees the truth of Q. Let's try that shall we?
Here's what it means to say life is a sufficient condition for suffering, or that being alive guarantees suffering.
If life causes suffering then living things should be suffering
I'm alive
therefore I'm suffering
Except I'm not. So the premisse is wrong. Why? Because living is only a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition.
Living does not cause a disease, it does not cause a car accident and it does not cause a break-up. Causality matters. The difference between necessary and sufficient conditions matters.
Ok, we can agree to that.. Still doesn't make it an "issue".
Quoting Benkei
Sure.
Quoting Benkei
You are not suffering right NOW. There almost certainly was and probably will be. That is the same for everyone.
Quoting Benkei
Yes but these examples are anticipated and countered by these past quotes I've stated:
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting schopenhauer1
The theme here is that one can't prevent all instances of suffering, but one can prevent the container that the instances fall under for a future case (by preventing that case from occurring). We know how people get made, so don't give me the non-identity argument please. The non-action prevents the case from happening. Simple as that. I can agree with you for the already living, that we have to mitigate as much as we can and maximize what is good, etc.
Ok Good. So then we are in agreement that living doesn't cause suffering?
If we are using it in a precise and not common-parlance way, sure it is necessary but not sufficient (unless we explore Buddhist/Schopenhauer's ideas of striving). However, I don't see how that is an issue. The inevitability and frequency of it, makes it such that it would be almost a truism to say "Life will have suffering". The question is, with this information, what does one do with it?
Agreed for the already living. Until further eradication or mitigation, why bring more people into it?
Is that your final answer? You know I'm going to say that falls into the "using people as a means" category. Now they have to deal with, because you wanted them to help with the already existing problem. Not only does it not eradicate or mitigate, it simply extends and prolongs for more people.
Ok, then the hope they will help is sufficient reason to go ahead and have people that will inevitably suffer? That is still causing the necessary conditions for suffering for a particular reason that is not the person themselves (thus being a means in some way).
No not really. It is a known fact that suffering exists and is almost indubitably inevitable beyond a doubt that someone will suffer in some way- even just negative interactions with other people you work with, anything. There is no way that this new person will do the impossible and 1) be able to 2) know how to be able to 3) even have the ability to be able to mitigate all or even most of their negative experiences. That's not possible but yet you know this.
C'mon dude. You know what my argument is. If it is a well known fact that If I do X and people will get hurt from it, why would you bother with this kind of non-argument?
This I find to be totally misplaced and irrelevant. It does not have to be the proximate cause for a particular instance, but it is a necessary condition for all instances.
To provide an example, if I have natural gas pumping into a room, that is a necessary condition for something blowing up. Every instance of someone lighting a match would be the proximate cause. I allow people to enter this room knowingly..is that correct?
Now obviously the analogy isn't perfect. There are good experiences to be had in that natural gas room too in our case. Also, the proximal cause in the real world case is always varying, but we know they will be caused, which is my point.
Actual people and actual harm. It's not only not perfect it is a false analogy.
No it is definitely not. In the procreational decision, everything is in the abstract, including the fact that harm (whatever it is) will take place for someone else. It is too late once born, it is likely at some point, something will happen. Every decision can't actually factor in harm, unlike the procreational decision which can factor in that existence is indubitably likely to have harmful experiences. Also, this has to do with someone else's life. The analogy would be more like, I knew that there was definite harm, and I forced someone down various streets that bad stuff is likely to happen anyways, even though I don't know what exactly bad stuff might happen (coronavirus, bad interactions, mental disorders, etc.).
Who undertakes the action is totally irrelevant as to understanding the causality. And in the abstract it's even worse; if people walk on the streets, then they may get robbed. Walking on the streets therefore causes robberies. As if.
Even if for some reason I caused people to walk on the streets, there's still no moral dimension whatsoever because there's no causal link.
I'd say that there is a caual link, but causal links themselves have no moral dimension, either. There is an additional component of intentionality implied in the judgement "to cause suffering is morally wrong".
I don't agree there is no causal link. You are making a conflation (category error?) between intention and cause. Living definitely contains/entails some amount of harm. Are we on agreement with that at least? Thus, with this knowledge, you might not intend for harm to occur, but you know it will at some point, agreed?
In any case, I'm signing off on this discussion because my patience with anti-natalism apparently lasts for about half a day and I post here for fun.
Some of us see the possibility of a bright future for humanity and indeed the world. Admittedly it's not looking very rosy at the moment. But it is not necessarily the prerogative of any individual to decide the fate of future generations, in the light of current conditions.
:smirk:
Ill abide. How about the unnecessary trolling?
1. Not enough testing/leg-work to identify cases;
2. Crappy healthcare;
3. Pre-existing conditions/bad lifestyle choices exacerbating likelihood of dying.
A combination of those three.
Or bad luck. For having Trump as president I suppose.
It doesn't surprise me, as the US has a disjointed healthcare system. Boethius gave an exemplary explanation a couple of pages back.
I don't follow US news, but from the dribs and drabs I do hear I gathered it had already gained a foothold before anyone had noticed. Trump is a rabbit caught in the headlights, this was not supposed to happen while he was grooming his place in history. He will be nothing more than a bystander I expect, while the national security and healthcare organisations sort it out.
a runny nose,
a cough,
a sore throat.
Of course, those are also the symptoms of a common cold. And since the Coronavirus affects the lower respiratory system, it does not actually cause a runny nose.
If you don't test much, you won't have many cases.
Allegedly.
https://slate.com/technology/2020/03/coronavirus-mortality-rate-lower-than-we-think.html?fbclid=IwAR2Di6GSNzwF8WJ4RDVmkLjwJr7x8sY5Bnwq-UJY_Uv3WmUu4EmjHP3XRZU
Well, it is likely a factor of two things one which is that one of the first areas to get hit was an elderly community where many people are over 60 and/or have underlining health issue that are problematic if they get the virus. There are some countries with hundreds of cases of corona virus and no deaths. The fact that in the US some of the first cases were at a elderly facility doesn't mean much other than we are very late in detecting the virus since people started dying before anyone knew they knew these residents were sick and nobody knew the person who gave it to them had the virus either. Right now it is likely that there are too few cases in the US to worry about the CFR number here, and only when it gets to be around 5,000 to 10,000 (which it should soon enough) will you have a better idea what the fatality rate will be.
I think the doctors here in the US are likely as good or better then the rest of the world, but there have been issues in the US and some other countries with trying to quarantine those that either are sick or may be sick and of course with making the test kits available. If it makes you feel any better watch the following video where a person let go from quarantine explains why he thinks the corona virus may not be all that bad. ;)
Coronavirus Quarantine Survivor on TV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5PXh4U8CJs
That's because the corona virus IS the common cold or at least to the best of my knowledge it is. If you want to know how you can prevent the common cold the best answer is that you really can't other than perhaps live in a plastic bubble for awhile. If the fact that it is more similar to the common cold than the flu doesn't bother you, then you are likely not scared enough yet.
Before assuming the fatality rate is as low as the flu as that article and Trump may be trying to suggest realize that extrapolating data in such a fashion is know as "cherry picking" and should be look down upon by others if they know that is how you like to obtain data. Now it might be true that in some countries they might be able to keep the morality rate lower than others and people that get the corona virus later on may have a lower morality rate than those who get it earlier, but if you are talking about everyone in the world you need to include ALL cases to get a proper number.
Also it is worth noting the the fatality rate likely doesn't include things such as people that might be indirectly killed by the virus (such as other people sick and injured but unable to get help) and the number of fatalities from people getting reinfected or people who may die if and when the virus mutates.
I never cease to be amazed that there are people out there who seriously think the corrupt warmongering hag that was the alternative at the time would have been a better choice. Mind-boggling.
Then again, parrotting the corrupt "mainstream" media does not involve much thinking.
There are reasonable points here, but the article is too focused on massaging the fatality rate. Yes, if you include asymptomatic cases, the fatality rate will go down. But the hypothetical asymptomatic cases that were not counted for fatality rate were also not counted for infection rate, so the net result is zero. All you've shown is that in addition to cases with pronounced symptoms, having fatality rate f, there are also X asymptomatic cases.
Now, if people were tested regardless of their symptoms, then knowing the true fatality rate would be relevant. This is the case with those who are quarantined and tested because of their previous contact with an infected person. But for most people testing is still confined to those with pronounced symptoms.
Oh, those emails, scary stuff.
So Trump's Middle East policy has lead to a good place?
It won't matter soon once the virus becomes endemic in the Middle East. Smart move, Trump should pull out all US Troops from the region, including Afghanistan and Pakistan pronto, or they will either get stuck in endemic hells holes, or they will bring it back with them when they return.
You mean the 30,000 e-mail from her unsecured toilet server that were all about yoga classes and babysitting? Have you seen them? I thought publishing it is a crime, no?
Quoting Punshhh
I do not see how the ME will ever be a "good place".
However, Trump has not started any new wars, he has stopped the idiotic nation building interventions, and he is gradually withdrawing. All the exact opposite of what "we came, we saw, he died, cackle cackle cackle" Hillary Clintons possible. So, yes, 100% better.
Again, wow people seriously can think that the person who destroyed Libya, supported the Jihadis in Syria, and de facto threatened WW3 in the debate is preferrable to Trump is, mind-boggling.
That can't be right. Death is a symptom. If you are asymptomatic, you don't die any more than you cough or have a temperature. And if you are asymptomatic, in most cases you don't get tested. That is why the quarantined ship makes a good statistical sample - everyone was tested. In China many were quarantined, but not tested, in general, symptomatic people are tested, and that tends to over-estimate the death rate.
Please make sure your politicians have corona virus before you bring them to this thread. thrilled though we all are to re-run the previous US election, we like to talk about other stuff too.
I did not start it. "Benkei" did! Blame TDS... it seems every bit as infectious as Corona.
Or will he bottle out and start denying the seriousness of the situation?
Actually, what you have is more like an allergy than an infection. Any contact with that to which you are sensitised provokes a huge over-reaction that takes over the whole mind and prevents thought about anything else.
I don't think I've got it, although I have had a tickly throat and a sore nose. I live in isolation already, well except when I go to Morrisons. So I am planning to wear my beekeeping costume and surgical gloves to go shopping.
Which situation? The ME or Corona? His natural reflex is to to be optimistic. And he gets bashed for that. But the "mainstream media" would bash him even more if is sounded alarmist. Damned if he does, damned if he does not.
I have neither TDS than Corona. No idea if I can avoid Corona, but as long as I have a functioning brain, I sure as hell can avoid TDS.
This is the Coronavirus thread.
Trump should do the right thing, not worry about his image, or the election.
That's what I said. Death rate is estimated on the basis of confirmed infections. Adding a hypothetical number of untested and asymptomatic cases doesn't change anything if what you want to know is how dangerous and disruptive the epidemic will be, or what your chances of falling ill are, or what your chances of dying will be if you develop symptoms.
Quoting unenlightened
Yes, I mentioned that too. When the entire population or subpopulation is tested regardless of symptoms, that is where the true fatality rate becomes relevant. But such testing is done in a small minority of cases.
Bottom line is that statistics should be used with care.
I see your point, but for most people, the "chance I die if I catch it" is very relevant in determining their reaction. For the big picture, cases requiring high intensity care are probably the most important statistic. For society at large, it doesn't matter all that much whether the eventual mortality rate is 1% or 3. But individually, 1% or lower feels better than 3.4%.
If you don't like the way that statistics is done, then your free to cherry-pick or make up any numbers that you feel like but in doing so it will be a given that your allowing bias to influence your judgement. If you want to only look at the statistics of the people on the ship then you can do so but I'm pretty sure there wasn't enough people on the ship to get a true sample size (which usually requires at least 2,000) and it is a given that wealthy people on a cruise ship are going to have access to better care than less wealthy people, people stuck in a hot zone, and/or people in developing countries.
If you listen to the experts on this, and even read between the lines with some of the things they are talking about you should realize this is likely going to effect us mush like the Spanish Influenza that happen close to one hundred years ago and kill more people than World War I and world War II combined.
The Spanish Flu had a significantly higher mortality rate, and hit societies which were in bad shape and had no warning. It also disproportionately affected young adults, possibly due to the war.
I do not have TDS, you do. Hope you get well sometime.
I agree this is the Corona virus thread. So take your antitrump cackling to the TDS thread, where it belongs.
A virus doesn't have to have a high mortality rate to kill more people than viruses much more people than it, it just has to be highly contagious and spread to nearly everyone in the world to kill tens of millions. Even if the virus is 0.25% to 0.5% lethal (which are very optimistic projections for developed countries), that is still deadly enough to tens of millions of people over the next couple years.
You may not realize it but the governments of the world are in no way equipped to handle this virus if it keeps going at the rate it has been. It's not a virus that has evolved from the something like the flu but more similar to he common cold which means that is more efficient at jumping from person to person. If you were a scientist working on a bio-weapon and you wanted it to infect as many people as possible there is a good chance you would either work on a virus like the common cold and try to make it a bit more lethal or you might try and work on flu virus and make it a lot more infectious.
Which is tragic on an individual scale, but will not necessarily impact society much. Even the impact of the Spanish Flu was limited, and it's still around (in less deadly strains) killing people.
Quoting dclements
It's likely to be a serious strain on hospitals and other healthcare providers. How bad it gets will depend on the rate of hospitalisations, how well we can protect the medical personell, and whether a vaccine is available quickly. I don't see why you think governments are "in no way equipped" to handle it. What do you think will happen?
I agree with dclements, for example the Italian health service is already struggling and they only have about 6,000 cases so far. It has become such a crisis that they have quarantined about 16,000,000 people and closed many institutions.
Strong come back. Erudite and all.
It's not anti-Trump to point out he's doing a shit job. But if you have TDS, everything is about Trump innit?
This wasn't supposed to happen, Trump was going to secure his place in history as a successful president. But now we have a global crisis greater than the financial crisis of 2008, perhaps as serious as the Second World War. Now as president it is his duty to step up to the plate and show presidential leadership. Will he perform, or will he shy away and attempt to downplay the seriousness of the situation, out of fear?
And I guess one could say the black death in Europe which is estimated to kill 33% of the human population at the time was kind of tragic but some human being survived and life went on. However I believe it is unwise to say that pandemics that kill a large amount of the people do not in any way change society of the psyche of the human civilization.
Quoting Echarmion
I think by definition when governments fail to stop an epidemic from becoming a pandemic that reaches nearly every country in the world then it is a given they where either unable or unwilling to contain a virus. The corona virus is spreading almost as fast as if nothing was being done at all.
As to what will eventually happen while we go through this pandemic and after it is all over is unknown. It is likely that if it spread long enough that like the flu and common cold at some point it will mutate/evolve and become different strains that will resistant to existing immunity to the current strain and any vaccines that might be developed to counter it. It think it is safe to say that just like whomever opened Pandora's box, trying to get everything back to the way it was before everything came out of it and getting the lid back on will be a bit more difficult than taking the lid off in the first place.
Simple statement of fact. Annoying, eh?
Afaik, he is doing his job. What exactly are you bashing him for, except being Trump?
[quote="Punshhh;3Quoting Punshhh
"Downplaying" is a loaded word. The president is supposed to be optimistic; if he was not, you would bash him for spreading panic.
Optimism is probably the wrong approach too. My point is he's going to have to step up to the plate now.
Whoossh.
It's closing in. Last Friday a school was closed for the day less than 20 k from where I live; today, more schools in the district; a month ago it was ‘some place in China’. And the stock market today here in Aus was scary. I think we’re heading for recession, the world’s been running on cheap money for too long, some bills are going to have to be settled, and they’re big bills.
The flight to safety is in full swing but it's unclear how much flatter this curve can go.
What you say here might seem reasonable, but thinking it through it is the result of confusing two kinds definitions of the economy.
"Supply line disruptions" for anything important is made much worse by "letting the virus ride" which is the current policy in the US, UK, Europe as a whole and globally. China is of course now implementing systematic quarantine and testing of air travelers from essentially everywhere as well as turning away people likely infected (what they insisted the West not do, which was an easy sell to Trump).
Let's focus on one resource: medical masks.
Supply line disruptions of medical masks are essentially guaranteed by letting the virus go out of control. It would be only through aggressive measures of containment that the growth of the virus would be slowed so that production and distribution of masks could be scaled to match need.
Medical masks need to be changed several times a day; so we're talking about a lot of masks, and medical facilities are already starting to ration masks and the pandemic has barely even begun.
Without a proper supply of masks, two things happen (both terrible). First, hospitals becomes a spreader of the disease as people coming in with false-positive tests, or for any other reason, are now highly likely to get the disease from staff and other patients. Second, lack of masks means exponential growth of the virus within the medical community at exactly the same time as it peaks in the general population. Even if masks aren't 100% effective (which they aren't) by protecting medical staff as best as we can, it means infection within the medical community peaks after the peak in the general population.
Exponential infection of the medical community has a deleterious affect on outcomes for the community as a whole. Surviving the virus is highly dependent on care. Sickness in the medical community peaking in parallel to the general population means the scenario with the least possible care available when people need it; obviously that's bad, but it gets worse. Experience is generally correlated with age, meaning the most experienced doctors, nurses and paramedics will be the hardest hit either dying or taking a long time to recover, which causes another second order effect of collapse of moral in the medical community.
By slowing the spread globally, through essentially stopping all long distance travel internationally and domestically and then maintaining travel restrictions, the mask issue could easily be solved.
With the magic of the internet, essentially all business travel can be replaced by online meetings.
The negative part of stopping travel is the stocks of the airline and tourist industry. However, it's essentially impossible to describe a scenario where such economic knock-on effects will manage to kill more people than the pandemic, especially considering it's easy to do things to stabilize the situation economically for airline and tourist employees.
So, if our priority is saving lives, then the "hard" decisions around travel aren't even hard decisions, it's just the obvious thing to do.
If we view the purpose of the economy as "that which allows people to live" then it's essentially impossible to conceive of a scenario where the knock-on effects of doing what's actually effective in slowing the virus (not token measures like "banning meeting above 1000 people") will somehow kill more people than the virus. Especially considering there are easy policy measures available to make sure people disrupted economically don't just die of starvation from not having money.
However, the measures needed to ensure people don't die from economic disruption have another word to describe them: socialism. Obviously, a pandemic of a lethal virus is one problem the market is unable to prepare for or fix; socialist policies such as a UBI for people unemployed by travel restrictions and tourism plummeting, and of course free medical care to ensure everyone can be proactive with seeking care, are the only effective effective measures.
Restricting travel, especially if it was done early when containment was still possible, is the difference between several million deaths and one hundred million deaths, which this virus could easily cause in the current laissez-fair global response.
Do not be fooled by the onslaught of propaganda that will try to spin all the deaths as "inevitable". In the current "mask crisis" scenario we are currently in, I would estimate it's a safe bet that 80 to 90% of the deaths would have been preventable in a situation sufficient "travel restriction" scenario. People like to say "ah, travel restrictions don't work" but that's only if it's done half-asked. Obviously, it's quite easy to control travel between places with no land connection by simply stopping all flights and rigorous quarantining of any essential travel.
It is only if we look at the economy's purpose as "that which provides dividends to investors" that it starts to make sense to "let the virus ride". Yes, doing so will kill millions, potentially dozens of millions, of people unnecessarily, but it is the fastest route back to getting things back to normal economically. "Quick and painful" is also the only route that does not require socialists policies of bailing out small business and individuals unemployed in the alternative "slow it down scenario"; obviously, if slowing it down is effective, the whole process takes a lot longer; much longer than can be reasonably asked of individuals and small business to simply "take the hit" with their own resources. Of course, there's already programs in place of permanent bailouts to the banks in the form of unlimited low-interest financing that other big business can easily access too; big business also has in general more resources to deal with a temporary disruption than does small business.
So quick and painful, "was really bad, worse than 'anyone could have predicted', but in the rear-view mirror now, things are getting back on track economically, finally!" is indeed the optimum choice if the purpose of the economy is to create dividends to shareholders.
However, if the primary purpose of the economy is to "keep people alive" then it's difficult to argue that letting 20 to 100 million people die is "worth it" to get the economy back to normal as quickly as possible.
Nothing terrible happens if the next iphone is delayed; people get it next year rather than this year.
Very, very, very terrible things are about to happen due to world leaders deciding to allow the unmitigated global spread of the coronavirus. Designing policy so that the peak is very early and so the medical community will experience a mask shortage is simply stupid. Masks aren't hard to make, by delaying by 1-2 months, the scaling of production and distribution of masks could be achieved at a global scale. Asking the medical community to deal with a respiratory viral pandemic without enough masks is like asking a modern army to fight a war without bullets, or, perhaps more apt, asking Republican politicians to raise money without corruption.
And everything I've described is basically admitted. Boris Johnson just came out and said "well, it's going to spread anyways". Yes, it will spread anyways, but there are massive difference in outcome depending on if something is done to slow it down or not. By saying "it's going to spread anyways", implying "so let's get it over with", he is thinking about the stocks and not the people; he is saying in no uncertain terms, "it's better to sacrifice a lot of people so global business can get back to normal as quickly as possible".
It's also interesting that the private calculus about the disease can run against what is socially advised. My dad is in a higher risk category, he's 70 years old and has chronic respiratory problems. If he develops corona now he's still assured to get the best health care the Dutch system can provide. If he gets it during the peak, this is not likely.
Johnson (Cummings) is like a rabbit caught in the headlights, as is Trump. The experts are telling him that we can't stop it, I expect they are saying that we should stop air travel, as well. It looks like the government is not stopping air travel, or other measures because they don't want to damage the economy. They don't seem to be taking the delay strategies seriously, I agree, they are thinking about the stocks and the money.
Also they have probably calculated that the virus will kill off a lot of older, ill people, which will solve the bed blocking problem in the NHS and save money. They are a hard right populist government which is only looking to the moneyed benefactors and friends. They don't want to jeopardise the Brexit project and will happily loose a few hundred thousand citizens and get it over with quickly, while safeguarding their ideological project.
I am hearing now that there is a military type triage operation in Italy brutally dividing the patients into those seriously at risk, from those with a good chance of survival. They prioritise respiratory equipment for the category with a good chance of survival and affectively let the serious cases die. They have got to this stage with only around 7,000 cases so far.
Nobody would be so callous as to make that sort of calculation, would they?
The government has a critical negotiation to complete in record time with both the EU and the US, as the UK will leave the EU transition period in December, deal, or no deal. They don't want to take their eye off the ball with this, their own survival as a government is critical to this, because if they are voted out of office by a no confidence vote, the opposition could get into power and rejoin the EU. This is what is most important to the government.
The pandemic is a detail, which will only clear out about 1% of the dead wood. It's of little concern, just like, the floods and climate change.
You're welcome.
Watching coronovirus unfold is like watching a dozen nuclear bombs go off in slow motion around the world. So slow compared to a nuclear weapon that it was extremely easy for policy makers to walk over and turn them off.
The habit of disregarding human life in favour of fantastical neoliberal reasoning to do what big business wants (... or then a dictatorial communist country that has a lot of money), in this case not shut down air travel, is so strong with the political class that it overrides everything else.
They are not even able to to think things through to the obvious conclusion that the inaction on this issue is A. political suicide and B. will affect them personally as well.
It went from "calm down, calm down, think of the stock-market, no one panic" to "we need a plan to protect congress from coronavirus" headspinningly fast.
Neoliberal zombie-think at it's finest.
Quoting Benkei
The only viable plan is trying to maintain essentially complete isolation of elders for as long as possible.
Though this is hypothetically possible, at the moment the disease is in the exponential phase. Due to the incubation period there is no way to pull off such a plan. Italy went from first confirmed cases to being overwhelmed and triaging in a span of 2 weeks with a paltry 6000 cases. Sine our leaders did nothing substantitive to slow the virus (such as stopping all international air traffic to give containment and contact tracing a viable chance to significantly slow the virus, if not stop it) and continue to do nothing substantive, we will have millions of cases within a few weeks.
The "incompetence" is so great that when the dust settles, the reasonable conclusion to make is that China knowingly played down the virus to maintain air travel (while understanding internally what they were dealing with) in order to ensure a global pandemic as an act of biological warfare against every other country (as if they succeeded in containment to China, only their own economy would be significantly impacted; instead, they let the virus loose globally and then succeeded in containment within China, which was certainly a deliberate act, by pretending "everything was fine" for as long as possible; it's of course easy to cooperate and be transparent with data after this policy objective was achieved and global containment failed), and, second, that Western governments decided to do nothing to slow the virus after China let it loose as an act of biological warfare against their own populations.
Yes we'll see if "containment light" is going to be effective.
The problem from a mathematical perspective is that, without intense travel restrictions and automatic quarantine of travelers and mass testing, new transmission chains just get imported in.
At the moment I find it fairly likely that growth rate is simply tracking the growth rate in ability to test, as you mention.
The pattern so far is that cases start, then there is a couple weeks without too many cases nor too many deaths, but this is simply due to the disease taking a fairly long time to kill, especially with good care which is available at the start; the deaths then jump suddenly when triage begins, followed by extreme measures when the health system is overloaded a week later. The danger with this "we're paid to be passive idiots approach, and our tradition is only to act in the public interest when our hands are absolutely forced by years and years of campaigning and protests and overwhelming evidence, as we protect business as usual" strategy is that by the time deaths start to be overwhelming there maybe x10 the cases already in the pipeline. The doubling every six days should be a conservative estimate, so if you wait until the medical system is overwhelmed before taking action, you've likely already locked in a few doubling times of critical cases already ongoing (i.e. people already sick developing towards critical) not to mention the new cases that will still emerge even with intense measures.
Only South Korea seems to have managed effectively so far with a statistically significant amount of cases, so we should just repeat their policies: everyone has a mask outside the home all the time, very widespread testing to catch new transmission lines followed by aggressive contact tracing, maximizing self-isolation and social distancing; government taking control of the production and distribution of masks. And this was put into place very rapidly after the first cases.
The Italy approach of diddle-daddle spectacularly failed within 3 weeks. Any policy maker should view that as "wait-and-see" is not an effective attitude right now.
Yes, that it can transmit easily in networks of young people (without anyone getting serious) and it can transmit from people without symptoms, is why measures need to be super extreme to lower the growth rate. Extreme measures is bad for business though, and (usually) facts can simply be ignored without any short-term consequences (for our politicians); that approach to epistemology obviously shouldn't be applied to things with short term consequences like a pandemic, but unfortunately it seems you can't have your useful-idiots on idiot mode only some of the time, it's an all or nothing epistemic posture.
It also should be noted that this uncontrolled pandemic is worse for business than had the virus been contained competently. "Get it over quickly" makes sense only in the useful-idiot framework of reasoning; there's many second order consequences that make the uncontrolled pandemic worse. Unfortunately, pandemic experts had not investigated this approach, they assume the goal would be to save people's lives and so have not developed the models needed to estimate all the economic dislocations caused by essentially welcoming the pandemic. Propagandists charged with maintaining the status quo have also not investigated the possibility that a global unmitigated pandemic is a very effective way to change the status quo, a much bigger change than is achieved by making sure planes fly as long as possible.
Agreed, but the issue then becomes how does a country remain free of the virus when other countries have pandemics, or it is endemic? Surely there would have to be multiple travel bans. I realise that this might not be so much of an issue once a good vaccine has been produced, but there is no certainty that this will save the day.
Going back to the apparent welcoming of the pandemic, this is also evidenced in the lack of provision for asymptomatic subjects and the spread via them. It seems that it had been accepted from an early stage that the pandemic can't be avoided and that it is better to preserve economies than fight its spread dramatically.
It was explained today by the UKs chief medical officer that the greatest risk in the UK is if the health service becomes overwhelmed. So the strategy is to ensure that the peak infection occurs during the summer when the health service is best placed to cope ( as there is usually a seasonal flu epidemic in the winter months, which puts an added strain on the health service). This is a risky strategy, but they don't see any alternative, either that prevents an epidemic, or that prevents a winter peak in infection, which is regarded as catastrophic.
I'm not confusing anything. On the contrary you seem to be completely discounting the real negative effects, leaving entirely aside considerations of the share markets, that curtailing all international travel would have on economies. Effects which would arguably be so great that governments would have no hope of propping up all those who would otherwise become bankrupt. You seem to be blithely ignoring the inter-connectedness and fragility of the global economic system.
The basic problem, that which is creating the conditions for runaway capitalism, industrial farming practices, resource depletion, soil, land and ocean degradation and pollution, is overpopulation. It is the continuing growth of the human population that necessitates endless growth economies. It is also arguable that such a growth would never have been possible without fossil fuels, the supply of which has already peaked.
I thought that the market volatility today was due to a row between Saudi and Russia over oil prices. Which in turn was symptomatic of increasing uncertainty and volatility in economies around the world.
There are two horns to the dilemma we are facing. One, we should make every effort, or there is a moral imperative, to prevent large numbers of deaths. Two, we should protect economies, from damage, or collapse. Which entails letting those people die.
So which is it, save lives, or save economies? I think we know the answer to this choice.
Both quite obviously. Since the economy entails pretty much every event that happens, then the imperative is to save lives.
And, it's not like every country in the world is not working on a vaccine. Ya?
I agree, but I expect this will happen anyway in a couple of months from now. The UK government is already preparing financial help including grants to prop up such companies when they become unviable. It is going to be a Herculean effort,a war footing if we are to pull through without economic collapse.
Addressing population levels, I agree and I think we have reached a point of vulnerability to pandemics, economic instability, climate and ecosystem instability. It looks like nature will provide a correction.
Most predictions are that it will be at least 18 months before a vaccine is being administered. The tsunami will have come and gone well before that. Also, if the virus is related to the Cold, there might not be an effective vaccine.
You don't need to eliminate the cold to reduce the lethality of Coronovirus, do you?
And, here's a tip... Take a vacation after the dust settles to some Indonesian Havana...
It's real insanity how a price war compounded by some really fucking irrational fear caused some hundreds of billions in losses for the whole world.
*Scratches head.*
I don't think there is a choice, because there is no one making the decision. The invisible hand has decided that human lives, and particularly the elderly in this case are not worth saving; economic necessity dictates the demise of most of humanity, because mass production and mass consumption is outdated. Capitalism no longer needs the working class. Corona virus, hostile environment, North African wars, refugee rejection etc all head in the same direction. And even the best democrat knows that dead men don't vote.
I'll be fine by the way, I live in a remote place, with some land and a secure income. I'm just holding on for the ride.
I wish I could say the same. But, all I'm saying is that the fear and paranoia are unjustified...
I doubt the resources are there to prop everyone up, but I do agree that international travel may be greatly curtailed if not altogether stopped. How will the airlines, who, I often hear, are already struggling, fare?
I agree that nature will provide a correction; whether this will turn out to be it remains to be seen.
"Save lives or save economies" is not a clear pair of alternatives. If economies crash countless lives will be lost that otherwise would not have been.
Not to come off as a totally psychopathic dick asshole, but millions of people will simply not die from Coronovirus. I believe the death toll is 3.5k, and as far as I know, new cases aren't dying from it anymore.
This is a ridiculous, completely unfounded, statement.
Yes, it is wrong. I stand corrected, people still die from this disease...
Yet, the point still remains, is the market reaction rational or irrational? I stand by the latter.
You'd think we'd get over our animalistic tendencies, ya?
Why is it taking so long?
Because we actually are animals?
Not really. We can learn from past mistakes. And, Coronovirus ain't the Spanish flu or the plague.
That doesn't make us condemned or dammed into some self created place of suffering. You don't like Coronovirus? I say move to some Island State, like Bermuda.
Yeah, if you can afford it...
Jamaica?
More like, do I have the balls to do it? Heh.
Just wondering if Trump is considered a more important matter than a pandemic.
It's the downturn, sometimes called "correction". Blame the triggering on whatever you want, it's inevitable because it's how people claim their winnings from the losers.
Cynicism about finance echoed and accepted, but, I mean, it seems clearcut the 'triggering' is corona ( or the perception of corona, if you want to push it one frame back.)
The markets surged so high, so fast lately, the correction was imminent. Analysts will always point their fingers at something as the trigger, but that's really only relevant if you could have foreseen it. However you could have seen that a correction was coming. If your company is solid it will get through.
Uhh, I'd advise you to invest in the company. I mean, 42 percent is really insane. Just make sure to kiss ass and maintain your position by claiming to have invested in the company already...
I agree with MU. It's a correction. Ride it out. Your company's stocks should recover shortly.
Isn't it nice in the light of everything you just said that in the US we have spent trillions of dollars on the war on terrorism, but have spent probably less than 1% of that amount preparing then country for the situation we are in now. :/
Luxury cruises sound like a colossal bore, anyway.
Has anyone discussed yet the ethics of these "open markets" in China? It seems pretty terrible for everyone involved- the animals, the humans that are local who go to these markets, and apparently all humans. For all the things this totalitarian regime cracks down on, they don't do it on this, which actually is harmful.
Oh they are something just for people your age, Bitter.
On the other hand, ships are the easiest places to be handled if there is an outbreak: just park them away from shore and don't let anyone out.
Stock markets always find a reason to go up and down. But here is the easiest prediction ever: While the "mainstream" media narrative was all along that the booming economy was a belated result of Obamas wonderful policy, the moment the economy goes down, this will change to the Trump economy. Like 1984... lets quickly revise all the textbooks.
The ethics of human and animal suffering do not exist in China. The open markets are only a tiny glimpse of that.
Who is "we"? Count me out please.
What does "step up to the plate" mean? What exactly do you want him to do that he has not done? I find this is a very typical situation... the Trump haters bash the guy, but never specify what exactly they want. Fundamentally, the criticism seems to be: orangeman bad, because orangeman bad.
I agree on the stupidity of the "war on terrorism", but likewise I would like to know what exactly the govt should have done to "prepare for a situation like this". And do you want the govt to "prepare" for any imaginable situation? You realize that that list would be unlimited, don´t you?
All he needs to do as President is show leadership, hold press conferences in which he spells out the situation, the risks and what needs to be done, pulling the people together in a spirit of cooperation and unity in fighting the threat. It's not difficult. But instead, I just heard him muttering something about flu and how great he is.
I know, there are many businesses which are already on the edge, prior to the effect of the virus. I don't expect economic collapse though, governments will just print money and bail critical businesses and services out.
Quoting dclements
I agree on the stupidity of the "war on terrorism", but likewise I would like to know what exactly the govt should have done to "prepare for a situation like this". And do you want the govt to "prepare" for any imaginable situation? You realize that that list would be unlimited, don´t you?
Correct. A correction was overdue, and in that sense corona was a welcome trigger. If the correction had happened without an obvious external trigger,, the fake media would have been all over Trump blaiming for it.
The notion that a stock market can always move up without any overextension and correction is childish.
I think he is doing it, although probably sometimes his natural tendency to be overly optimistic gets in the way. It sounds like you base your opinion on the selected snippets and opinions that CNN et al feed us. Try get out of the bubble.
Who ran on a platform of "the US sucks"?
Yes, the effective action would have been stopping nearly all international travel, with strict quarantine for necessary repatriation or other necessary travel.
Quoting Punshhh
Yes, very early Western governments decided to stop any effective containment.
That it would be "best for the economy" to do so, however, is wishful and fallacious thinking which I'll get into in my response to (but short answer is that letting hospitals get overloaded followed by mass quarantine measures shutting down a large part of the local economy, is much worse economically than shutting down air-travel and related industries; staggering the epidemics in time, with adequate preparation, by shutting down air-travel would have been a big hit to the airlines and related industries, but simply bailing those out is much cheaper than the complete economic meltdown we're now facing due to the choice to never do reasonable containment; large scale local travel restrictions is a much larger economic impact affecting all industries and of course the worldwide simultaneous spread and crisis results in crash of air travel anyways).
It was explained today by the UKs chief medical officer that the greatest risk in the UK is if the health service becomes overwhelmed. So the strategy is to ensure that the peak infection occurs during the summer when the health service is best placed to cope.[/quote]
This is not the strategy. To do such a strategy (a good idea) requires stopping nearly all international travel, which they are not even stopping from Northern Italy. UK officials simply kept us updated in real time of how useful idiots go about reasoning. They have not, as will be clear in a couple of weeks, chosen a path "good for the economy but at the cost of some lives", rather they have chosen to maximize cost to both the economy and lives. That they presented their complacency to themselves as a some sort of choice, with pros and cons on both sides, does not mean that analysis is correct.
Italy went from a few cases to country wide quarantine measures in 3 weeks; all other countries in Europe will follow suite unless they take the same measures preemptively. All of Europe under quarantine conditions has a far higher economic impact than had all travel been stopped from China early on, rigorous quarantine measures for all remaining international traffic, scale-up of testing, and rigorous contact tracing implemented for cases that slip through the net. What Italians are now living, and soon the rest of Europe and US, is far more disruptive than aggressive travel restrictions early in the outbreak. Although China certainly realized early on the scale of the problem and that the best national security response would be to infect the rest of the world while doing intense travel restrictions internally, the rest of the world (in particular Europeans that do have some leaders capable of basic reasoning) did not have to play along; they chose to because they are weak-willed and the useful-idiot reflex to downplay threats to the public is so strong that they were unable to reason to the logical conclusion that letting things play out would be much worse for the status quo than a few more weeks of complacent status quo.
Hopefully this pandemic will be a wake up call for the future, as worse virus's may come along in the future.
The explanation you propose of why you are not confused, is exactly the confusion I am talking about.
The economy, viewed as thing that keeps people alive, is not complicated. People need food, water, shelter, clothing and a list of things diminishing in difficulty to provide in a short term crisis.
Shutting down international travel simply doesn't have the crazy affects that you describe, especially temporarily. And all the negative affects, because it is temporary, can be easily dealt with by simply allowing the companies affected to temporarily lay off employees with the government paying unemployment through existing or new schemes. Without employees to pay, costs are very low to simply put a business on hold and whatever ongoing costs can't be avoided, could be just bailed out.
Such a travel freeze could have come into affect at first for a period of, say 3 weeks, time to come up with an effective containment strategy for the outbreak. Travel bans and strict quarantine measures would then be in place when travel resumes.
The current attitude is that "containment was never possible, so it wasn't a mistake not-to-try". This is wrong. Not only was containment possible full stop (as was achieved with Sars, Mers and ebola), effective containment could have radically slowed the spread of the virus globally.
Without simply stopping international travel, however, then yes, containment is impossible.
So, had travel been stopped, the cost of paying unemployment, bailing out airlines and tightly related industries, extending low-interest loans to severely affected industries, etc. is quite low. By having an effective containment strategy, international travel could then resume between countries with no cases. So a lot of the world gets back to normal with very little disruption to the business of the airlines.
More critically, entire sectors of domestic economies would not be essentially arrested simultaneously around the globe at the same time.
Italy has just implemented severe internal restrictions on gatherings, shopping, restaurants, etc. (what the news calls a quarantine but is not really a quarantine, just lot's of restrictions). The economic impact of this is extremely high.
For the sake of trying to keep things normal for airlines, these intense measures will be soon essentially global,, affecting all sectors simultaneously.
This is orders of magnitude (several orders of magnitude) higher economic damage and far harder to deal with than simply bailing out a few large airline and air-related companies (like airports etc.).
Instead of a few dozen billions of dollars, maybe a few hundred depending on how early and effective the plan was put into place, to deal with temporary disruption of shutting down international travel (essentially insignificant problem for central banks) now the damage is likely a worldwide economic depression.
So, by not making the hard decisions of stopping international air travel for 2-3 weeks the time to get a handle on things, followed by a travel ban of all countries that have cases in that time, followed by a gradually restarting travel with effective containment and testing measures ... a big cost but far lower than the economic impacts in just Italy (which is just a single country).
Time would have also allowed for far better understanding of how the virus transmits, what treatment strategies are effective, and most importantly scaling up production of the items, starting with simple masks, that could be first distributed to medical communities around the world and second distributed to the population, so that when epidemics to arrive in a country, transmissibility can instantly lowered through everyone wearing a mask and the medical community would not be powerless against themselves becoming infected, infecting others, lowering moral and care workers available (a ridiculous thing to let happen when there was a window of opportunity to avoid it).
Right now we don't know if reinfection is possible (reports but no way to confirm compared testing errors), nor do we know the long term life-cycle of the virus (it could lay dormant in other organs), nor do we know of the long term health consequences (it could cause long term damage to lungs and other organs). Without such knowledge there's no way to calculate the cost benefit of favouring "the economy" compared to lives to begin with. Nor do we know how exactly the virus propagates and with what relative probabilities (such as surfaces, asympotamics etc., all critical to know to have an effective containment strategy). Stopping global travel to get a better understanding has all sorts of benefits along with slowing things down to enable better preparation.
Claiming "well we didn't know how it spread so of course we couldn't contain it" is not an argument, as it could have been much better contained the time to figure those things out.
Finally, effective global containment, even if it did transition to a pandemic, would have staggered the peak in each region and country, allowing the global medical community to help each other and human and equipment resources moved around from peak to peak. This is a massive benefit for dealing with the pandemic our leaders decided to forego in favour of simultaneous, short term, medical overload and for much worse economic effects. Staggering the epidemics in each region would have not caused a economic crash, as the global economic affect of only one region being disrupted at a time is far lower than all regions simultaneously.
Our leaders listened closely to airline CEO's, as Trump and Pence are simply proud of, but it turns out airline CEO's didn't have any understanding of epidemiology nor the massive economic consequences of their desire to ignore the problem as long as possible. Our leader listened to neoliberal economists who provided the non-containment case of "it's only old people", but it turns out none of them had ever teamed up with an actual scientist and mathematician to model the "let's let it go out of control" fallout (because economists aren't real scientists that expect their propaganda to ever have meet up with facts that are shot term enough for large amounts of people to notice).
It's true, with a fatality rate of "only 1 to 4" percent, from an economic perspective we could just let those people die and continue as normal, maybe even good for the stock market at resources go from older spend-thrift people to their younger spendy inheritors.
However, people simply don't accept "just letting a few million people die in our country" as public policy, and, despite the complacency and bravado of their leaders at first, quickly demand action is taken when their loved one's start dying in terrible conditions. As I mention in an early comment, complacency was also political suicide. People aren't going to be happy about "choosing the stock market over lives" and that goal wasn't even achieved due to no epidemiologist ever bothering to investigate under what conditions might it seem just letting people die is a good idea economically but actually is a really bad idea when model things things through competently. Epidemiologist thought their job was to save lives, not the stock market, and that's why they failed the politicians in conveying in the perspective of the stock market (that letting thing run rampant is actually worse for the stock market; had leaders understood this, action would have been swift, immediate and effective).
Quoting Janus
Yes, I agree with capitalism being the basic problem. With a social safety net, these "hard decisions" are not even that hard decisions, as the institutions are in place to make sure no one dies of economic disruptions.
However, I disagree that population is the problem. Of the equation "Impact = Population x Technology x Affluence" there's no feasible way to lower population significantly (to 0.1 - 0.2 of current levels) without collapsing the ecosystem ... which is what we're trying to avoid. However, our technology and affluence can be easily (compared to global genocide) reduced by a factors on the order 0.1. Indeed, I would argue it's possible to reorganize economies to benefit nature and have a positive impact overall (through radically different ways of living). This is a discussion for another thread though.
The current epidemic will help the environmental movement I believe, but only because it will unmask neoliberalism as an incapable governing ideology. If world leaders did not have this ideology they would have moved instinctively and decisively motivated by the preservation of human life (and in turn, preserved the global economy though they would not have known that at the time); therefore, the disease of neoliberalism would not have needed to be cured by a world wide pandemic due to incompetence, corruption, and a deluded neoliberal inspired belief that "getting it over with" would be good for the economy even if a few old people die.
We're about to witness a significant (i.e. noticeable decrease in capacity) part of the medical community die for no reason around the globe, which isn't good for anyone.
Clearly its not just a bad idea but a catastrophe in waiting. This kind of interaction of so many species, including ones as you describe should be just as high a priority as other things like climate change. The same goes for bushmeat practices in Africa. But a lot of the exotic animal trade also goes back to China. Clearly, interaction with animals in the wild in such an unsanitary way what is causing these diseases. That's not to say that they are not also caused by domestic animals, but they seem to be more stable being they have been around humans for 10,000s of years. But species such as bats and the like are not at all like that. Where's the outcry on this type of practice and its consequences?
Also, a great consequence is also the benefit to the animals themselves who wouldn't be confined, tortured, and killed off the planet for bizarre and ancient ideas about the "benefits" of eating these animals, or crushing up their body parts for whatever supposed remedy. This is not only something on behalf of animals, but humans too, if that matters to anyone.
2h ago:
The travel bans are happening anyway (since letting people die for preventable reasons to protect the economy only sounds good as a neoliberal sound bite, but isn't viable public policy in the short term; it works well when consequences are longer term and propaganda can intervene in the interim to make people believe obvious lies).
The travel bans are now simply too late to have a big game changing effect (still helps a bit though).
So what did the "bring on the virus bro! policy of BJ" accomplish? Two, maybe three weeks, of normal (but increasing abnormal as time went by) flight operations.
Is that really a big benefit compared to the massive costs of importing an epidemic as soon as possible in a sort of "man against the elements, fist shaking into the wind" proud-to-be-ignorant pseudo-moral stand?
Rhetorical question of course, I will let the next few weeks verify this claim for anyone with any doubts.
In your usage, how would you define "neoliberal"?
This is probably best to split off in another thread, but I use neoliberal to refer to the broad western (and now global) governing consensus based on three main pillars: A. GDP growth is the top priority metric determining policy, B. that globalized free-trade of goods and capital, and also people to an extent, is a policy goal C. most importantly that corporate profits should be prioritized over any given concept of the public good (that the idea of the public good should be removed from public discourse whenever possible, and simply replaced with corporate profits as the metric of the public good, such as viewing the increase in the stock market index as the increase in the public good)
Based on these objectives, whenever the environment or people's health or threats to democracy due to the concentration of power is in conflict with corporate profits then those ills should ideally just be accepted, and if not, then policy should err on the side of corporate profits and only changed with overwhelming evidence, intense and high-effort public mobilization and as many obstacles in the judicial and political system as possible, and the bare-minimum policies put in place for the strictest minimum public or environmental welfare reasons (which is always denied to be related things even when it's necessary to accept that the public welfare exists from time to time).
There are then many different variation to justifying this governing framework. For instance, some may truly believe laissez-faire free trade not only works but current economies approach that ideal as an explanation for anything viewed as "good" and anything that exists that is "bad" is truly believed to be caused by non-laissez-faire government interventions.
However, mostly the justifying framework is "there's no other choice" and different ways to justify that position.
Ebola, Marburg (both hemorrhagic fevers), HIV, Zika virus, SARS, MERS, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (mad cow disease), and the corona virus are examples of recent animal-human disease transfers. (in the midwest a wasting disease has infected a lot of the deer population. As far as I know, there hasn't been a deer-human disease transfer, but hunters are getting the carcasses tested (state mandated) before they eat them.)
Influenza is another disease from animals, with a complicated bird/hog/human cycle. (Viral genes get rearranged in birds and hogs, then to us.) Every year there is a chance for the most dangerous genetic arrangement to show up (like the 1918 version).
I mean, what's the point? You get on a boat; most of the time there is nothing to see outside but water, sky, and a horizon. Maybe a much smaller ship on the Inland Waterway between Vancouver and Juneau, with the chance to look at bears and whales would be OK. or a riverboat cruise in Europe. Or maybe paddling a canoe around Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis--more my speed.
They have all-gay ones.
Why do you say that? I do think they have a big game changing effect.
When has the pandemic started to spread out of control? Besides, it's obvious it is far less contagious than your average flu. Ireland has 24 cases, my country 40 cases whom all have gotten the virus outside the country (usually in Northern Italy). I don't think that the situation is lost and travel bans now are futile.
Injecting more money into the system will cause inflation, particularly if there is a shortage of available goods in the market.
Wuhan to my front door in 61 days - impressive!
The idea that reducing the human population would collapse the ecosystem is also absurd; as I see it the real situation is precisely the opposite. (Collapse the present economic system (if reduced radically over a short period) yes).
Human overpopulation and the consequent overuse of resources, transporting stuff and people (and diseases) all around the globe has created an overly complex and hence fragile global economic system, that could unravel in any number of ways. Have you never heard of the "domino effect"?
The one point I do agree with you about is that shutting down all air travel from China as soon as the very first cases appeared there (given that those first cases could have all been identified and that the Chinese would have been honest in their assessment of the situation and sufficiently concerned for the welfare of the rest of the world's people) might have succeeded in stopping the virus from spreading beyond Chinese borders. But if even one case escapes the net then the only way to be certain to contain the future spread would be to shut down all international travel (and perhaps even shipment of goods, given that the virus can apparently remain viable on surfaces for up to nine days).
There's no point arguing over this, though, since insight generally cannot be instilled via argument. Let's wait and see what happens.
I don't think this is meaningful. Environmentalists, biologists, ecologists and economists would not agree. You're just saying that everything on Earth is part of nature. Sure, but that doesn't add anything when it comes to discussing pollution, climate change and the impact humans have.
If humans weren't here, there would be no plastic, no concrete jungles, no monetary systems. The fossilized plant material would remain in the ground. And the climate would be different.
Well surely if "international travel" includes "international trade" then I think those "crazy affects" are almost certain...eventually (you are right that temporary measures may not have a huge impact, but if temporary is 1 year or more, it seems that more than 3% of the worlds population would die as a result (about 34 countries are dependent on food imports, for example).
Do any human beings actually support this principle?
But this is to make corporate profit into the public good, it is not to prioritize it "over" the public good. See the difference? One says corporate profit is more important than the public good, while the other says corporate profit is the public good. But even the latter is just an illusion anyway because the profit is not shared equally by the public.
It's obviously true that profit is not shared equally, but that goes for most business profits, not only corporate profits. Don't get me wrong, I think corporate salaries generally are obscene. I also think that superannuation should be invested, not in share markets or property, but in government bonds or the like, so as to disentangle the public good from corporate profit.
But it ain't going to happen...
For example in Italy yesterday, there were reports of people queuing outside supermarkets, at least one metre apart, to buy food. They weren't allowed into the shop, the attendants would bring out the food individually and some items were restricted, or rationed.
I can't speak for Boethius, but if there is a collapse of civilisation, there could be some quite adverse effects in the short term, like mass fires, nuclear explosions, wreckless destruction of ecosystems.
Ugh, terrible place.
I know, I'm closer to Norwich fortunately.
Well, it seems my overly long analysis wasn't long enough.
I'm responding to your point that "stopping the planes" would have some crazy economic consequences that would have easily outweighed the consequences of the disease, or at least it's reasonable to have such a posture in an age where opinions carry no onus to defend them critically and are just a "right" and none better than another.
I defined my use of the term economy as "that which keeps people alive" and I was quite clear I'm talking about short term measures.
If you want to bring the entire ecosystem into it, which is of course valid in the long term, but in the short term that people get food to eat and water to drink is something that is simply happening and could continue to happen even without planes flying. It's quite simple to keep people alive in a "can't fly crisis" that was created by governments to avoid a much worse crisis of "total exhaustion of the medical system, long term harm to the medical system, and hundreds of thousands to millions of unnecessary deaths ... and, oh yeah almost forgot, an economic depression level event".
Yes, the whole phenomena that is happening on earth as we speak could only be described by a very, very, very, very long vector of parameters and an equally impressive computer program to change the state of that vector. It's complicated in that sense, just like "throwing a ball" is complicated in the sense of all the calculations and nerve interaction and motor protein movement and cell metabolism that is happening for that phenomena to happen; it is simple to throw a ball in the sense that people throw balls all the time no problem.
It is simple to keep everyone alive without planes, even long term, who cares about plane travel.
It will be difficult to mange the tsunami of suffering that is upon us, it will be stressful to decide who lives and who dies, complicated to manage limited resources to face unsolvable problems, as well lives destroyed by the economic disruptions; granted, in an economy I seek to fundamentally change, but not like this, not like this.
The "not flying" would have been bad for airline and related stocks but good for the "not dying part".
However, since everything I have been talking about is about to unfold in the next couple of weeks where you live, I'm going to let your immediate short term experience speak on my behalf.
It is a rare time that this conversation here on the forum is not anonymous; my arguments I have developed here will be screaming in your face.
I will remind you in exactly 3 weeks about this topic and whether you still think the economic disruption, however you want to think of the economy, and more importantly the loss of life, that will be far, far from over, was at the same level of cost or risk as the economic disruption of stopping the planes when the window of opportunity to keep the growth rate of the pandemic -- or even stop if from being a pandemic in the first place -- was still open.
Yes.
People who believe only in maximizing their own gain, do not want society to frustrate their efforts. Completely coherently with this worldview they will argue that their profits should be prioritized over any given definition of the public good. If they are diversified in the stock market, they will argue that whatever policy increases the value of the stock market is good.
However, although it is a perfectly coherent worldview, it does not create a coherent public position on any given topic. You'll need a public and private position so to speak.
Mostly, the counter argument to any given definition of the public good that the profits in question represent a threat to, is the framework of "rights". That there is a "right" to sell whatever it is and to do whatever actions are needed to maximize that selling that has become legal due to previous victories of this world view, such as deceptive marketing, lobbying etc. That a corporation is a person with political rights is the pinnacle of achievement in this way of counter arguing against the public good. It's such a habitual tactic that what's obviously wrong with this line of reasoning -- that all laws and rights only make sense as deriving from some public good, as if they derive from private interest there can be no coherent set of laws in ever private interests are competing with each other, which is the whole premise of the whole alchemic project of stupid we call modern economics, that also jumps in to support this world view most of the time, as it is in the interest of the economist to get paid to do so -- and therefore, rights and laws can not, in some coherent ideology of governance, be by definition against the public good. So, this sort of conversation doesn't ever go anywhere, it is just a tactic to confuse people who are unable to see it is taking the concept of individual rights out of context, and that individual rights are themselves there to mitigate the harm of an unequal society, protecting the weak from the strong and something is argumentatively wrong if they are being used to protect the strong from the weak.
Mostly, however, people supporting the neoliberal ideology, simply are not able to formulate the concept of the public good to begin with. They empathize with the investor class and it simply makes sense that profits should be protected ... even if it means massive social programs of trillions in bailouts to the banks, subsidies of all kinds paid by the public, obvious harms to the public both short and long term -- they may recognize that there is something off, but they can never quite put their finger on it.
But, today, I can use obvious examples of what I'm talking about.
When I read this headline today I was genuinely surprised Trump was "Shaken into action", and curious what measures weren't too late. Then I started to read...
[quote=Bloomberg news;https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-11/trump-s-pivot-from-caution-to-major-economic-plan-for-virus]
Aboard Air Force One, Trump Was Shaken Into Action on Virus
We’re tracking the latest on the coronavirus outbreak and the global response. Sign up here for our daily newsletter on what you need to know.
As Air Force One sped toward Washington on Monday, the historic impact of the coronavirus outbreak became inescapable for President Donald Trump.
Televisions on his plane were tuned to Fox News, which broadcast dire graphics illustrating the single worst day for stock markets since the 2008 financial crisis. Matt Gaetz, a Florida GOP congressman who had accompanied Trump to a series of fundraising events in Orlando, had isolated himself in an empty cabin on the jet after learning he’d had contact with someone infected by the virus at a political conference.[/quote]
Article is behind a paywall, but only talks about the stock market and Trump's efforts to help it.
The writer sees no problem that Trump only took real notice of the pandemic thing, which is supposed to happen to poor people that are never mentioned in this article as needing actions towards, when the stock market crashed. The writer sees zero problem with the framing that it is through the lens of the stock market to judge the priorities: first fiscal support, lower interest rates, bailout fund, tax cuts ... and never even mentioning addressing the pandemic.
Also notice the dramatization of Trump's own personal danger, taking in the "oh shit, I could get this thing" that certainly crossed the minds of the entire investor class as well; so they can empathize with Trump empathizing with them in a very visceral, stuck in a human body sort of way.
Why?
Because the neoliberal theory, that sounds good to the neoliberal investor class and propagandists, that developed and "went viral" last couple of weeks was, seeing the economic horror entailed by containment ... let's just let nature take it's course! Get back to normal as quickly as possible so the stock market can get back to climbing as usual.
Instead of addressing this catastrophic policy, neoliberals will just ignore it or defend it as "a reasonable thing", just too hard to stop those planes and shrink those airline dividends, it was too horrifying to consider, and, crucially as seen in the article, jump right to the bailouts that are now needed; not for the gig economy workers of course, not for people to be able to stay home and not spread the virus while working heaven forbid, nor for small businesses many already destroyed by their first key event now cancelled.
It sounded good,"let it run it's course", but I'll let events prove or disprove the theory that it really is good for the investor class.
There was no pushback because there was no model of the economy developed by epidemiologists for letting it "run wild", as I have mentioned. Epidemiologists assume the priority is preservation of life. Hearing this, and terrifying recommendations of stopping flights, the neoliberal ideology instinctively assumes it's another one of those cases like the "environment" or "toxic chemicals" or "health care for blacks and white trash" or "education of the poor" that can just be ignored and "nature can just run its course" in all those situations. The problem is that those things can be ignored, not because "nature runs it's course" in some neo-eugenics view of the world, but because cause and effect are separated by some distance and propaganda can always intervene between those two points in time to convince enough people that the lies were never said, if they were said it was reasonable to say, that the alternatives were also lies, and the lies are still true anyways when you think about it.
It is simply habit that anything that protects the investor class short term can be defended and no one defending that will ever face consequences. As normally changes are relatively slow and investors can just shift assets if ever the public does seem to be getting a small victory on some issue and discussion can thus shift to protecting those new assets.
This is a unique situation where the "we need to balance action for the public good against the economy" position faces immediate consequences and propaganda has a much harder time making people believe it's because of the muslims or something like that, and there was no time to shift assets and the economic and political fallout is a profound existential threat to the status quo. They'll still try, it will be interesting to see if they succeed.
Sure there could be such adverse effects, but they are not necessary concomitants of civilizational collapse. The one worry would be decommissioning of nuclear facilities.
I'm saying the effects of stopping all international flights would likely have incalculable short, medium and long term effects on economies, and that humanity may just not have the economic and, more importantly, energy resources to recover civilization from a catastrophic collapse. I'm not saying that would necessarily be the case, but that neither you nor I have any way of knowing whether it would be the case or even how likely such an outcome would be.
I'm also not saying that stopping the planes would not be, or have been, my preferred option, because the sooner business as usual as we know it ceases the better for the planet and humanity in the long term. I also don't think it is likely that business as usual will ever voluntarily cease in any case.
Indeed if China had completely closed its borders early enough it may have been possible to prevent the spread of the virus beyond China, I don't dispute that. But only one person would need to get through undetected...
I thought had adequately explained my point; unfortunately not.
When I say "there's no feasible way to lower population significantly (to 0.1 - 0.2 of current levels) without collapsing the ecosystem" I mean there's no feasible way.
How do you actually get rid of all those people? Why is suddenly the world devoid of complex second order consequence in such a plan?
Please explain how you reduce the population by 80 to 90 percent without the destruction of the environment as either the mechanism of population reduction or an immediate consequence. People are just gonna get a letter in the post and walk into the sea?
Ok, let's see in 3 weeks if you still think stopping all the flights when it would have prevented or significantly slowed the pandemic is what would have had the "incalculable short, medium and long term effects" leading to "catastrophic collapse", whereas the "let the pandemic run free" scenario we're now living, that includes air travel bans and significantly reduced air passengers in general, has less economic consequences.
No where is it implied that air travel means all international trade.
But, to clarify the matter, a pandemic is not arrested by stopping all international trade, whether in the air, at sea or over the internet, but by stopping vectors of the pathogen.
Let me be as precise and erudite as you desire me to be. Effective containment on the global scale, once a pathogen is endemic in a region, simply cannot be done without extreme restrictions on air travel.
We don't know exactly how the virus is transmitted, exactly how close you need to be ... but we do know that you can't get sick from someone on another continent. For you to get it from them, in the short term, one of you, or something, needs to fly.
As for trade, we don't know if a bunch of factory workers in china coughing all day on amazon packages can't transmit the disease. WHO says cash can be a vector, seems reasonable you could put cash in a package and it would still be a vector. So it would have needed to be checked. If it did, then yes, to contain the virus international shipping needs to be paused too. However, it's an easy technical problem to solve, as most goods can be decontaminated relatively easily or just left to sit for whatever times is needed, and the decontamination process, such as just heating, can be streamlined for anything essential.
Even if stopping air travel doesn't maintain containment, the pandemic would be significantly slowed down: buying time to prepare, research, organize, optimize a strategy, as well as stagger the regions the virus hits as containment fails at different times. Yes, big hit to the airlines and disruptive to a small section of upper middle class people who happen to be flying international at or around that time.
Way less economically disruptive than what's happening now though. Flying is only one of many industries, and if containment was implemented early and effectively, flights could continue between all other regions, instead we now have global collapse in air travelers due to bans or cancels ... and the collapse of the rest of the global economy ... and hundreds of thousands to millions of people dying, in the near term future to be precise, for a preventable reason.
The thing is once the virus gets into many countries, the only way to eradicate it, if that is at all possible, will be to cease all air travel, because otherwise closed communities where it is eradicated will be re-infected. So it never would have been a case of stopping the airlines from operating just for a short time, but at least if flights from China had been stopped early enough, flights to and from other countries may not have had to be shutdown..
What's that "behavior" terrible for the economy? People not wanting themselves or their loved one's to die for a preventable reason.
If people had just "taken it", carried on as usual and not bothered about shaving a few points off the demographics, things would be merrily steaming along.
Why the neoliberal intellectuals are so shocked is that governments actually have to act in the interests of the public over the stock market in this instance. It is too quick and traumatic experience to not react once that becomes clear. Which is why Western governments, each in turn, wait until the emergency status is reached before reacting; what's happening just doesn't compute in neoliberal land. People should just rollover and die for the sake of the stock market, why aren't they just sucking it up and dying!
You haven't been following this conversation, and I no longer have time for you.
I haven't said anything at all about radically reducing the human population deliberately, or anything about how such a thing (done in what most would think an acceptable way) would be possible or even desirable. So, it looks like it isn't I who is failing to follow the conversation.
On the other hand, if it were decided to simply euthanaze 80 or 90 percent of the population how exactly do think that would adversely affect the natural environment?
Ok, I was being too literal again (if ALL international travel is stopped then ALL trade is stopped). I can certainly accept that was not your position.
It does seem the terrified attitude would eventually lead to a shutdown of trade (schools in the US are close to all closing...it seems business would follow soon after), and few people seem to consider just how dependent the world has become on international trade..
However, everything you said seemed reasonable and I appreciate you taking the time to lay it out for me .
No. If you don't delay the spread of this, your healthcare system will be completely overwhelmed. This thing killed 20 residents of one nursing home. There are over 10,000 nursing homes in America. That's A LOT of really old and/or sick people on respirators. We're about two weeks behind where Italy is at and Italy is imploding.
You do realize that general well being (pollution, living space, etc) is generally linked negatively to GDP, or do you not? I.e. the proverbial shithole countries that our celebreties love to defend but never move to are characterized by low GDP and horrible living conditions and pollution.
Maybe take a closer look at those talking points before repeating them.
I haven't said anything at all about radically reducing the human population deliberately, or anything about how such a thing (done in what most would think an acceptable way) would be possible or even desirable. So, it looks like it isn't I who is failing to follow the conversation.
On the other hand, if it were decided to simply euthanaze 80 or 90 percent of the population how exactly do think that would adversely affect the natural environment?
Which is why the corona virus pandemic is almost as bad as an actual bio-weapon being released:sure it doesn't outright kill a higher percentage of people such as the viruses in movies or Steven King's book "The Stand", but having almost all the potential problems of any deadly highly infectious disease makes it what we in the philosophy business like to call a "non- trivial issue" when it comes to getting rid of it.
Governments by design are reactive not proactive, once a problem presents itself and they manage to resolve it they are more or less ready for whenever that problem happens again (such as if another Hitler wanted to invade France) but pretty slow on the draw when it comes to big problems that are a bit different to what they are use to. I'm not sure exactly if neoliberalism plays a part in it since it is likely more than just one narrative at play and it would be hard to imagine just one ideology or paradigm at fault here but I imagine it is likely just at fault as many of the others however that might not be saying a lot.
The stock market doesn't care if people die because just as Trump pointed out millions of people die from the flu every year and many people don't even bother to get flu shots. What it does care about is that the corona virus has put a nasty kink into various projections companies have made for the upcoming years and on top of that it presents a new potential existential threat to the global economy , the status quo,and the world as we know it. It's kind of like that old stock market saying "Buy when there is blood running in the streets", but that is assuming of course no of that blood is your own and that there is anything worth buying after the blood shed is over.
A curious thing about the black plague most people don't realize is that a lot of people got richer after it happen (since many people inherited money quicker/easier then if it didn't happen), the living standard improved for those that survived (reliable help was harder to find and more expensive after about 33% of the population was gone), and it may have saved Europe from even a worse fate. The problem was that before the black plague the population was either reaching it's max threshold for which the available farms could support or already there. If the plague didn't happen then it is likely as many people would have died from either starvation and/or war until more farm land could be developed. Of course, it is debatable whether dying from a plague is any better than people dying from war and starvation even if the latter may use more resources than the former.
The unimagined existential threats may be unlimited but the imagined existential threats are not quite so unlimited. During the time of the cold war and before the term "weapons of mass destruction" was coined the military had something they liked to called NBC warfare with the NBC referring to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Since biological weapons can be quite different from each other (and sometimes difficult to detect and identify when deployed) there is no one size fits all plan to deal with them if and when used. However if it was all but a given that one was used then it is highly likely that the military would setup quarantine zones to contain people if it was believed if what they were exposed to was dangerous and highly infectious.
Of course we don't live in the cold war anymore and whatever those plans for dealing with biological weapons and people exposed could be all but forgotten. However even if those plans are no longer around it is almost a given that the military still has some contingency plan if some rogue country or group did something since today it is likely much easier to develop such weapons that during the cold war. I'm sure that such measures are a bit more..draconian then what most people in Westernized countries are use to but with countries like China and Italy trying to effectively quarantine entire cities it isn't entirely much different than that. The only issue is that countries that wait too long to use such measures don't benefit if there are already too many people exposed. While I'm not saying that a unmodified military plan would be best when dealing with the corona virus, I'm also not saying that a modified military plan wouldn't be better then what countries like the US are already doing.
I think I more or less agree. If you get a chance (ie. don't die from the corona virus in the near future), I recommend reading a book called "Economix: How and Why Our Economy Works (and Doesn't Work)" by Michael Goodwin. It explains certain thing that are not taught in economics class such as why and how companies charge as much as the can for a product and how large corporations can be as or more detrimental than large governments.
Some corporations (like people) are good, but obviously not all of them. Here in the US it is preached that corporations should be able to do whatever they like and that any government hindrance will hurt both profit and people's well being. I personally think not having corporations answerable to anyone other than their shareholders is no better than trying to run a town or city without any police and why corporations act like their in the "Wild West" when dealing with their employees and the rest of the world as a whole.
You have it backwards: corporate profits are dependent on human beings and human good. This a given since human beings/human good have existed for hundreds of years before anyone invented the notion of corporations and corporations are dependent on the work of human beings (or at least the work of sentient beings) in order for them to exist.
I think the unpredictable effects would be due to the degree of chaos and the efforts of vigilante groups to survive. So a large degree of chaos might make any attempts to contain or decommission nuclear facilities impossible. Also vigilante groups could ravage our remaining ecosystems for short term gains, or survival.
I do agree with your suggestion that air travel would have to be stopped for an extended period. Indeed, if one area has endemic virus and another has managed to eradicated it. Then there can be no air travel between them for the foreseeable, and strict controls on other forms of travel. The implication being that for business to continue as usual to any degree, all countries will have to allow the virus in and manage it as best they can.
Notwithstanding the long term affects will depend on efforts to come up with an effective vaccine.
They are dependent on wage slaves, a large class of subservient, pliant, people.
Except the UK.
A Trumpian response.
Perhaps it should be said that Italy was the first country to ban flights from China, which made then people to circumvent the ban and fly from other countries. And now is the one worst inflicted areas in Europe (how bad we will know only afterward).
An excellent read placing the COVID outbreak within wider capitalist dynamics:
"The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure –or better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations. Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture and, more specifically, livestock production. At present, few governments, and few scientists, are prepared to do so. Quite the contrary.
.... Capital is spearheading land grabs into the last of primary forest and smallholder-held farmland worldwide. These investments drive the deforestation and development leading to disease emergence. The functional diversity and complexity these huge tracts of land represent are being streamlined in such a way that previously boxed-in pathogens are spilling over into local livestock and human communities. In short, capital centers, places such as London, New York, and Hong Kong, should be considered our primary disease hotspots."
Yes a good read and I don't reject any of the theory. But I was listening to a virologist yesterday who said that Covid19 matches to a remarkable degree a virus found in Pangolins. He was suggesting that this virus may have combined with a similar coronavirus found in bats. This points in the direction of Chinese medicine, or bush meat trade. There have been many reports over the last few years of the very high price of Mandolin scales on the black market, most going to markets in China. This has become such a lucrative trade that Pangolins in the wild are in danger of extinction.
Well, that is well and good but it is a very generic statement, that you could make about any US government and in fact against any government. Hindsight is always 20-20, isnt it.
No, a very obvious response, since the UK is controlling her borders, unlike the EU. Any other TDS kneejerk comments?
LOL!
Now that's a truly kneejerk response from a loyal Trump supporter!
No matter that the UK has more deaths now from the Corona-virus than a larger country like Germany which is partly considered epidemic area btw. And that England’s deputy chief medical officer has predicted “thousands” of cases of coronavirus in Britain during an “epidemic peak”.
Or that that the UK doesn't see any Trump-styled travel ban necessary...
No, the kneejerk response is that UK after Brexit takes care more of her borders. :grin:
And anyway, the virus is already firmly in the US. (Seems like accusations of syndromes is the new vogue.)
You are just fumbling, trying to use Corona as another excuse for Trump bashing. Typical TDS symptom.
Any criticism seems to be TDS for you. Extremely typical.
Because what is the argument that the UK is taking care more of it's borders here? You answer that one.
UK didn't have travel bans or flight suspensions to China. Italy had them!
See Travel Restrictions on China due to COVID-19 for what the situation was some days ago.
The response to an epidemic is something more complex than just a ban, especially if then other measures aren't taken. Here you can see the differences how various governments cope with the situation.
I am not defending that the UK is late with restricting flights from CHina, just pointing out the UK is not part of the idiotic Schengen agreement, and not subject to the EUs insane migrant quotas. Look at the Greek border to see what is waiting for Euro0pe. I except the the flights from the UK to be restricted too, fwiw.
Now take your childish TDS to another tread, thanks.
Every Western government actively pursues growth. When environment and growth conflict, they will pursue growth. The concepts of wealth in its broadest sense and growth still haven't been integrated to make sensible policies. Instead they compete for government budget, with a final say by whoever is in charge of finances. That doesn't even have to mean major pollution immediately. But in the long run, we all know where it's headed. The costs of a diminishing quality of life is externalised, eg. borne by others than those making these decisions. Usually citizens in a given area.
Local examples: The Netherlands had a green space defined in the 80s where they would never build. They started building there in 2000. The airport wasn't supposed to have more flights. They changed the rules so the way sound pollution was measured changed. Roads have killed entire animal populations despite warnings it would do so because they were build across migration routes (and migration tunnels were too expensive). These were clear sacrifices for the benefit of economic growth. And here we're pretty environmentally minded due to a historic dependency on good land use planning since half the country is below sea level.
Austerity measures themselves are direct examples. A crisis created by banks and sovereigns results in bailing banks out, paid for by tax payer money. Instead of raising taxes for the beneficiaries so that they repay the bail out (which would even make economic sense) social benefit programs were cut. Wealth was destroyed because politicians fear a tanking economy if banks fail. Whereas the "free market" approach would be to have shitty banks fail for being shitty.
It's clear where a government's priorities lie and it isn't with sustainability or wealth creation but raw economic growth because that's the only measurement everybody talks about. How's the economy doing? Great, GDP was up! But that doesn't tell us anything (especially if it's credit/debt fueled).
So, no, this is not just a talking point.
Hence this has nothing to do with the corona-virus. Which is quite typical. Because that's what I get from Trump's response too.
Also what is very typical is the ignorance of the present. Europe really isn't the same as it was in 2016, but that naturally doesn't bother you at all. Notice that Greece closed it's borders from refugees from Turkey and the EU supported this. The EU has given money to Greece for it's border control and made a rapid response team ready to give support to Greece if needed. Everybody see's behind of this the manipulation of Erdogan after Turkish troops got killed in Syria by Russians.
But that of course doesn't fit into the Trumpian World view where only the courageous Brexiteers are taking care of their borders.
There seems to be a trend in government to hand over enforcement of consumer protection rules, to the corporations themselves, as a form self-governance. The health and safety rules are set by government agencies, but the task of inspecting and enforcing the rules is given to the companies which manufacture or produce the goods. This saves the government a good deal of money by not having to set up a network of inspection agencies, but it has a complex negative effect. First, the corporations are so huge that the same company in production might have a branch involved in health research, advising the government on health rules. Second, it excludes from existence small companies without the capital to set up their own inspection and enforcement system, reporting to the government. And third, as I think might be the case in the Boeing situation, the inspections and governance might not be very rigorous, falling into loopholes for the sake of profit.
When the third becomes evident, in the food industry for insistence, with listeria outbreaks, E.coli outbreaks, and other contaminants, consumer confidence in the corporations' capacity of self-governance wanes. We've lived under the illusion that the government has agencies and systems designed to protect our health and safety, when in reality that responsibility has been assigned to inanimate entities, corporations, without feelings, emotions, or sensibilities, structured for one purpose, profit. I can't wait for the self-driving car revolution, might have to stay home for the rest of my life and learn how to practise agoraphobia.
What I find at least as interesting is that Trump's travel ban fits discursively into a strategy he employs routinely, it is the fault of the other, in this case the Europeans. It is a very effective strategy of course, because it reinforces the belief of a special nation with good, clean people under threat of a dirty perverted outside world. If only we could thrive by ourselves and develop to the fullest we cannot be stopped. Instead other countries try to weaken our spirit with hoaxes like climate change or as in some earlier statements he indicated corona. The travel ban fits in a patter on politics by emotion instead of by ratio. It is one of the key elements used by totalitarian regimes. See Karl Loewenstein's article on militant democracy, DOI: 10.2307/1948164 and no, he was by no means anti Amercan.
PS, pour mr. NoBeerNoLife another one and make it strong. It is impossible to produce more non sequiturs anyway and perhaps he will enjoy his beer in a calmly fashion. I also advocate raising his taxes just for the hell of it.
Riight ....because everyone out there is talking about mobilizing the military, enforced quarantines, and enforcing martial laws in hot zones which my argument very (yawn) generic. I imagined if instead suggested we should hire hundreds of clowns and make endless balloon animals the same could be said of such an argument as well.
And it isn't 20/20 hindsight that is telling me anything, it is just a basic knowledge of how of viruses (& pathogens) work and knowing how the corona virus is different from thing like the "normal" seasonal flu. All I have to know is that corona virus is either as contagious or even more contagious then the common cold AND that it is believed to be at least ten times more lethal then the flu and I'm able to discern that it is a natural virus that nearly bio-weapon grade lethal capability. I will admit it took about a week of trying to read up on it before I could be fairly certain of it (which was about a week after Chinese New Year before various organizations started talking about it being "air borne" virus). This was a little before March and just a before the news started talking about the first few cases appearing in the US.
Also nobody is talking about the high possibility that over a quarter to half of the human population getting it (ie. anywhere from about 10 to 100 million dead), after catching it people being reinfected with it, and the probability that before a vaccine can be created that it evolves/mutates into another virus (just as SARS like virus is responsible for creating the corona virus) and we have to go through this all over again since immunity systems and drugs developed to deal with the corona virus today are not going to be that helpful a mutated version of it.
Yet just cutting flights doesn't do it.
Italy is a case example of how do this wrong: stopping direct flights simply made people to take other hubs. And then of course you cannot exactly know who has come from China, whereas with a direct flight from China you can inform the people what to do and what cautions to take. The most important thing is to get information to everyone and prepare for more serious outbreak and to start controls.
Quoting Tobias
And don't forget Trump's first response, it's the new hoax of the Democrats! America has tackled the coronavirus!
Trump just few days ago, joking as he does:
Trump now, reading the teleprompter:
Here you see perfectly the stages how Trump deals with matters. Ad hock, one could say.
I think he's already got it.
If drastic actions are taken they might break the tenuous balance between national security and freedom, especially in liberal democracies. If anything, the reactionary responses will set a new precedent for the future.
I suspect that the obsequious manner with which people look to officials for assurance and lullabies indicates an authoritarian impulse that will in many cases justify the minimizing of freedom for the sake of security, as if we need governments to tell us to wash our hands and not to touch our faces. Let’s be careful what we wish for.
People are dying because of that kind of ignorant attitude. Please don't play politics with this and go crawl back under the rock you crawled out from under.
Here's the reality folks. If Italy had acted sooner, this may not have happened. Death rate there stands at 6%.
https://nypost.com/2020/03/12/italian-actor-luca-franzese-pleads-for-help-in-video-showing-dead-sister/
That the "Hong Kong" virus killed about 34 000 - 100 000 in the US (and 1 million globally) and didn't cause such drastic measures than the corona-virus tells also something. I'm not sure if corona-virus will kill so many. But it wasn't such a huge thing in 1968-1968 as now.
Question is how much we do for one life saved. At least the economy seems no so important.
The director-general of the WHO stated today:
These warnings should not be taken lightly.
I would argue that the citizenry can do better to suppress the spread of the virus than a government. But given that entire generations since then have been raised in a cradle-to-the-grave environment, perhaps these days dependency on authority is stronger than self-reliance.
What a knuckleheaded response. Dude, your extreme ignorance unfortunately is rearing its ugly head once again.
Your response as yet another reminder of the dangers of extremism. That's one of the reasons why we pay taxes you doofus; CDC, FDA, Homeland security, etc
Golladay what rock did you crawl out from under. And you call yourself a conservative?
How about this, don't ask for a test when , if God forbid, you get infected!
I’m not a conservative.
The balance between freedom on the one hand and security on the other is not that contentious of a debate, at least outside of specific bubbles. So I’m not sure what you’re on about save for routine hatred of those who think differently than you and a general taste for histrionics.
Has the corona-virus epidemic effected your life yet?
My actual job is organizing training courses. Today the Finnish government came out with sets of instructions and limitations, for example the cancellation of big events. Hence my employer decided to cancel all courses until the end of May, so I guess I have more time to spend here on PF! Children are still going to school, although the politicians are debating if schools should stay open or not and if Finland should apply emergency powers legislation (which would be a first since WW2). The worst plunge in history of the local stock market happened here today (-10%), so there went part of my savings for some time. But oh well, stocks go up and down.
Nobody in the country has yet died of the virus and there has been 109 reported cases, 50 in the capital region, which all have been tracked to infections in foreign countries (mainly Northern Italy). The crucial event of a patient with an untraceable infection hasn't happened, as it has in Sweden. The estimate the high point of the pandemic is expected to be here in the summer.
How is it in your neighborhood?
I'm in NYC and my company shut down the office and told us to work from home until further notice
The Spanish Flu killed tens of millions. And here's an example from the time of why strong government intervention is necessary.
"In 1918, the city of Philadelphia threw a parade that killed thousands of people. Ignoring warnings of influenza among soldiers preparing for World War I, the march to support the war effort drew 200,000 people who crammed together to watch the procession. Three days later, every bed in Philadelphia’s 31 hospitals was filled with sick and dying patients, infected by the Spanish flu.
By the end of the week, more than 4,500 were dead in an outbreak that would claim as many as 100 million people worldwide. By the time Philadelphia’s politicians closed down the city, it was too late."
https://qz.com/1816060/a-chart-of-the-1918-spanish-flu-shows-why-social-distancing-works/
This really is enough to highlight the inanity of the type of things @NOS4A2 is saying. No doubt he will continue to say them anyway.
Unless you have a transformation recently, your support of right-wing extreme politics says that you're a staunch conservative.
As far as freedom viz pandemics, governments, unfortunately/fortunately can help people help themselves. Especially when there is an abundance of prevailing ignorance. It's called public safety you numbnuts!
Sorry I'm busting your balls but you got to tighten up dude
Whether he's part of the whole Russia thing I have no clue but his incessant willful ignorance and irresponsible comments has reached a dangerous level. I hate to say this but I would recommend banning him.
I think your reliance on government for your own safety, even in times of pandemic, is indicative of a growing authoritarian impulse found rife in the Western world. Hopefully you saw the Chinese response and the cries of the people there, as the government stripped them what little rights they had. All I’m saying is we should be careful what we wish for.
This guy's got to go. His goal here is now clear and painfully obvious. His propaganda is dangerously motivated. I've seen enough to call it what it is...
I get the sinking feeling that perhaps you’re scared of my arguments, and the subsequent realization that you have little to combat them with save for lies and appeals for censorship. But we can turn our disagreement into an opportunity to strengthen our own beliefs.
I think it's absolutely wrong to play politics, especially delusional politics, with a life and death situation like this. But it's obvious what he's doing, and it's fairly easy to counter if you have the stomach for dealing with him. You can also report his posts. If a consensus develops in the mod team that @NOS4A2 is indeed a troll with an agenda, action will be taken. (And that goes for anyone who's reported. Now let's get back on topic).
This is unjust and unfair. I have done nothing wrong.
Look at the graph comparing the Spanish Flu outcomes in Philadelphia and St Louis. Many more died in Philadelphia because the government failed to take action to stop the parade during the pandemic. Should they have acted or not?
Your point may have been well-taken if I had been speaking about the origin of corporations and their dependence on humans for that. My point was concerned with the current co-dependence between corporations and the common good (or at least what is generally seen by our society and its individuals to be the common good; i.e modern medicine, comprehensive health care, social welfare, the benefits of technology, comfort, convenience etc, etc, the financing of all of which are dependent on our present growth economy, and will continue to be so unless the population begins to diminish instead of growing).
Your example also shows how much things have changed. And hence I'm in the camp that even if the corona-virus is a killer, it's not a killer like the Spanish flu. The numbers are unlikely in the ballpark of even the Hong Kong virus when it's over. My argument is:
a) Modern medicine. Antibiotics. Knowledge how to prevent pandemics.
b) International cooperation on the subject. We've learned a lot from past pandemics.
c) Information society: news spreads extremely quickly. People learn through the various media extremely quickly and know what to do.
d) Different attitudes. We don't take this as just a "nasty flu" and go on as if nothing as with ordinary influenzas.
NOS4A2 can bitch about government overkill on the issue, but that is what they do. They do put limitations on all of us, even if it's a tiny fraction of us that get the worst of the disease.
Quoting NOS4A2
Especially with a pandemic, the actions of the citizenry make the difference. But you simply cannot avoid the fact that coordination is absolutely crucial. It's a team effort. Hence, you need a citizenry that will take the necessary precautions. Not eat garlic & vitamins and think that's the cure.
https://youtu.be/1LfQlYESTHg
Jimmy Kimmel on the virus.
Your arguments are clear propaganda. And you're right, you're willful ignorance is scary.
Others including myself have repeatedly made attempts to educate you, but you continue to either play dumb or play like an ostrich and keep putting your head in the sand only to complain it's dark. You would just argue for the sake of arguing. It plays into your goal of furthering this dissension and dangerous propaganda.
Surely it would have been better had the parade not occurred. The city should have stopped the parade.
Thanks Baden. I will vote for his removal accordingly. Politics is one thing, but the health and well-being of citizens worldwide is another.
That's where government comes in. Look how bad Italy is now and imagine what it would be like if they hadn't been put on lockdown (even more so re China). The danger is of a whole health system collapsing. Not just for Covid sufferers, but for everyone. And panic, looting, and so on. The infection curve is exponential and if you don't catch that quick enough with coordinated and enforced government action, you could end up with social collapse. That's not hyperbole. It's a real possibility and sacrificing a few freedoms in the short term is a small price to pay to prevent it becoming a reality.
I don't know how significant an effect that vigilantism precipitated by panic, and the concomitant lawless plundering and theft, would have in a pandemic crisis. I had more in mind the unpredictable economic effects due to cascading failures within what is an extremely complex, interdependent and hence fragile system that is dependent upon diminishing resources and subject to ever-growing demand, so-called "domino" effects that might be precipitated by an unforeseen event such as a pandemic.
The fragility of our global economic system is hidden behind a smokescreen of burgeoning credit, which sustains the dangerous illusion of economic growth and the idea that the human economy can grow forever, unconstrained by nature. The money economy cannot forever remain apparently decoupled from the energy and resources economy; at some point there must come a reckoning.
Which is depending on government to deal with a pandemic, no?
Yet you said earlier:
Quoting NOS4A2
I’m not sure why a government would hold a parade during a pandemic of such proportions. I can only wonder how it might have been had they not done so. Maybe they aren’t as fallible as we are led to believe.
And should Trump have banned all flights from Europe today, without consulting anyone in Europe?
The record drops in shares in response to his knee jerk reaction are understandable. They realise that with such an imbecile in charge of the country anything could happen.
Should he be recalling his troops from the Middle East? You do realise don't you that the virus will go endemic rapidly in the populations in the region, causing chaos far worse than we've seen so far. Does he really want to leave his boys there to get infected in a hell hole?
You know what, he probably hasn't even given it a moments thought.
Too little, too late. Donald "Pandora" Trump
I oppose Trump’s travel ban on the matter. I preferred what he was doing before: leaving it to the states to govern themselves.
If only we lived in a world where literally everything was privatized, in the hands of big corporations. Nothing would go wrong with those smart people in charge.
Well, those who have actually worked directly with the administration on their own efforts, such as the Mayor of New York and the Governor of California, have praised Trump’s coordination. So I suspect your claims are somewhat misguided.
Quite, I was thinking of the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, " off with their heads, off with their heads".
"Off with their heads!"
Ummm....the states? So 50 different approaches what to do? And how many borders? Especially when there's only a few without corona-virus cases?
Meanwhile, at the DNC:
We'll be dry in no time!
Yes, I certainly don't want to dismiss, or even diminish, any estimation of the effects of human panic and self-interest in a projected scenario of total collapse. How desperate people might become would seem to depend on how total a possible collapse might be.
It might have been that most of those people wouldn't have died. So, yes, the government should have stopped it because they, not the citizenry, are ultimately responsible for decisions regarding public health and safety. And the citizenry should be able to reasonably presume if events such as this are given the go-ahead, they're relatively safe. In other words, the government are in a better position to combat pandemics because they have the power cut through confusion and misinformation and act decisively for the public good.
Quoting NOS4A2
So, your position doesn't seem coherent to me. It's part of a government's job to combat massive threats to public safety. Individuals are responsible for their own safety to a large degree obviously, but they can only enact this responsibility in the social and legal context the government creates for them. For example, if the government tells you you can stay home from work, your ability to protect yourself from a pandemic greatly increases. That is not dependency, that's a properly functioning society.
When the framers drafted the Constitution they opposed giving the federal government much power over the states. I think we should try to maintain that as best we can.
You really think everything is a states right issue? Everything seen from the states vs the federal authority juxtaposition? Of you feel that states rights, individual freedom etc. have to be mentioned here because otherwise combatting a pandemic might cause these freedoms to be diminished? :roll:
Dealing with a pandemic is a clear example of an international endeavor, actually. Starting with things like accurate information, having the ability track where the infections have come from.
International cooperation in fighting against a pandemic isn't a threat to states rights or individual freedoms.
Looking at the response of the Chinese, Iranian and Italian governments give me pause to accepting that claim. I think any citizen who was concerned about his health, given sufficient education, may avoid public gatherings without first being told to do so by some bureaucrat. I think the press, those whose job it is to inform the people, have more responsibility than a government.
From the perspective of someone who believes in minimum government, I have to disagree. I think that you’re right that a government can enact this responsibly, but their results are so hit and miss that I worry they may exacerbate the problem rather than mitigate it.
I never said that. I only think a local government is better equipped to handle local problems than a central authority in the other side of the continent.
No, the health bureaucrat can tell if it really is ordinary flu or something more worse, if the information relies on medical facts.
It's not the journalist writing the article about that ought to decide if a new strain of a disease is more harmful than others.
Quoting NOS4A2
But just like a war, it isn't a local problem. Would you have left the defence of Hawaii only to Hawaii when Japan attacked Pearl Harbour? Minnesotan's wouldn't have had any worries about the Japanese in 1941.
It would be rather stupid for every local government to have their local version of the CDC to be on the lookout for pandemics. (And of course, Trump has been eager to slash the budget of the CDC btw)
Yes, they may, but we've just established that in practice, they don't. And you've agreed the bureaucrats (government) would have been right to step in and shut down the parade in the example I gave. Again, your position is self-contradictory.
But it is the journalist who informs the people of the facts, or at least should.
I don’t think the analogy is accurate. Healthcare systems often vary from state to state.
I said the government shouldn’t have held a parade during a pandemic. It was the government’s parade, held by the government, and it led to countless deaths. So, by your very example, the government did exacerbate the problem in practice and as a matter of fact. No contradictions.
What? So, if the parade had been privately organized, the government shouldn't have stepped in and stopped it if they knew it would likely cause thousands of deaths?
Sorry, I assumed the government held the parade. Who privately organized the parade, out of curiosity?
A journalist is not a medical professional.
And the bureaucrat or group responsible of advising the political leadership ought to be. The journalist might ask from others in the scientific community to verify the claims of the bureaucrat, but still it's not him or her who decides what infectious disease merits more response than others.
Quoting NOS4A2
But tackling a pandemic isn't an ordinary health care issue. It simply isn't.
That parade was organized by the city authorities. I'm asking if it had been privately organized, how would have that made a difference? One way or the other, the local government had the power to either let it go ahead or stop it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fqw-9yMV0sI&feature=youtu.be
I try to avoid counterfactuals but for the sake of argument I suppose it would not have made any difference.
Again, I’m talking about informing the public, not deciding responses to infectious diseases.
It is more a healthcare issue than a military invasion.
In that case, you are for the bureaucrats stepping in in the case of a pandemic and doing things like controlling public gatherings. The exact thing you seemed to be arguing against earlier.
And you can inform the public annually when influenza season starts. Or that someone's got the plague in New Mexico. When should you be so worried about it...not to participate in the parade welcoming the veterans returning home? Yes, an individual is responsible for oneself, yet isn't responsible for deciding public health matters.
Quoting NOS4A2
You are giving no reason why a pandemic would be a normal healthcare issue and to be decided at the local level. Putting the decision let's say to a communal level simply refutes any effective measures to contain a pandemic because a) communities don't have borders and hence b) one community's tougher controls will have no effect when neighbouring community chooses lax measures.
I know what I am for and what I am against. I am against the bureaucrats stepping in for the same reason I am against any other group stepping in. I am for personal liberty and the responsibilities required to maintain it.
Either way I think the evidence you cited is irrefutable. It is a safer world when the bureaucrats restrict our freedoms for the purpose of maintaining safety. For someone who prefers security over their own liberty this might be favorable. But for someone who prefers liberty over security, this is regrettable.
OK, so you're against doing the thing you just said you're for doing (stopping the parade) because tying yourself up in a pretzel of libertarian rhetoric is preferable to admitting you are not as crazy as you would like us to think you are.
So it's regrettable that the Minnesotan had to defend Hawaii from a possible Japanese invasion in 1941.
Quoting Baden
Yes. That's what I gathered too.
But it's great that someone stands up for liberty, personal freedom and small government! :nerd:
Everyone, it's ok to call this for what it is: fucking stupid, no need to tiptoe around it.
Again, I’m speaking about the press, who are better equipped to relay information about current affairs to a vast audience.
I never said it was a normal healthcare issue. I only said that healthcare systems vary from state to state, so treating it like a military or federal problem is misguided at best, disastrous at worse. With such a large scale problem federal agencies risk becoming too thin. They might as well use the infrastructure and systems already in place.
You had to invent counterfactuals to make a labored point about how great governments are at solving pandemics because you didn’t want to keep repeating that it was the government who held the parade that led to loss of life.
This is the second time you’ve brought up Japanese invasion in a thread about a pandemic.
Letting the government do the things they're supposed to do and we elect them to do doesn't inhibit freedom, it enhances it. And if a contrary ideology leads to the absurdity of preferring sickness and death to government intervention, dump it. And this goes not only for public health: Just about everything we have that prevents us from living in the woods and being devoured by bears, just about everything that has allowed the notions of "freedom" and "liberty" to flourish has been given to us by successive governments building on a social contract we all benefit from. In other words, the vast majority of what any of us has in modern developed nations, we owe. Your ego may not like that, but that's reality. That doesn't mean government always gets it right—we need to hold it accountable—but ranting about "liberty" every time said concept is invoked is a sign of a profound ignorance of history, civilization, and our social nature. It's a much more serious injury to liberty to be bound by a diseased ideology than to admit you need a little help from your friends up high to get by.
:eyes: :up:
" In the case of Alex Azar, he did go to the president in January. He did push past resistance from the president's political aides to warn the president the new coronavirus could be a major problem. There were aides around Trump - Kellyanne Conway had some skepticism at times that this was something that needed to be a presidential priority.
...My understanding is he did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that's partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear - the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall."
https://www.npr.org/2020/03/12/814881355/white-house-knew-coronavirus-would-be-a-major-threat-but-response-fell-short
Yes, what a self-serving, cretinous arsehole!. I remember the archidiot a week or so ago telling the people to attend political rallies, since they are "perfectly safe".
He even got "neurosurgeon" Ben Carson to go on TV and tell people it was OK to go to his rallies. Disgusting. And yet Americans will still vote for the guy who would rather watch them die than lose a few points in the polls.
Even a parasitic worm can at times help it's host in one way or another, but that doesn't mean it isn't a parasite because it does so. Corporations are created to increase the wealth of their owners regardless of whether or not they are doing it for the "common good". Both capitalism and socialist propaganda talk about the virtues of their ideologies and the "evils" of other ideology (if you ever been in debates about Ayn Rand's philosophies and other topics you might be aware of such arguments), but all ideologies at the end of the day are merely a ideology and none of them are really so great that they solve ALL problems better than all other ideology just as if your only tool is a hammer everything will look like a nail to you.
Also the idea that EVERYTHING we take for granted in our modern world is dependent on corporations since there are many organizations that provide for the public good that are not corporations themselves. Also the problem people have with corporations is that not necessarily that they exist, but that the US and other governments don't actively regulate them as well as they should, and this is partly because because lobbyist money/bribes to politician often influence them to look the other when they are causing problems and/or write laws that favor them at the expense of other people.
But seriously I hope it won't overload the US cats system but I'm pretty certain it will unless there's a full lock down in the US banking internal flights.
Btw, if this is still a thing come election time I'm sure they will postpone it and Trump will remain president.
Would travel restrictions still be useful? Or is the only thing left to do to avoid contact with other humans as much as possible?
As you might expect I see it differently. I try to think of the countless cases of “letting the government do what they’re supposed to do” and come up with little more than state-sanctioned oppression. But that’s one of the joys of being raised in a relatively free society: one can remain ignorant of the battles it took to achieve it, mostly because he’s too busy enjoying his freedoms to bother fighting for them. It reminds me of the George Bernard Shaw quote: “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”
But whether it was Apartheid or the Iron Curtain, whether it was Jim Crow or slavery, in nearly ever case the end of oppression and persecution was achieved not because of the government, but in spite of it.
Things may change quickly though. 2 days ago, the only measure in my state was that large gatherings were canceled. Today it was announced that all schools, kindergardens etc. will close on Monday for 5 weeks. If the infections don't slow down markedly, I suspect all non-essential services will shut down in a week.
Starting next week my office is working from [s]The Winchester[/s] home until this all blows over.
Falling for the fake news again? Trump did NOT say the virus is the hoax. He said the politicizing by the Democrats is their new hoax. And he is correct.
Why are many Trump haters so gullible?
The same reason many Trump supporters are so gullible. Because many people are gullible.
The open borders with hordes in unchecked crossers have everything to do with the Corona virus. Get real.
You're absolutely right. China opening their borders and allowing American citizens in to catch the disease and then fly back home is the root cause. I guess we should have shut down all travel years ago.
I agree, the system based on growth is a system-inherend problem. We have to address that, i,e, by shifting growth from physical growth to service industries. However, the notion that shithole countries with their massive environmental destruction and pollution are better for the environment than richer countries is deluded. I.e. take a look at a satelite photo of Tahiti and the Domician republic. You can see who destroys the forests and pollutes the ocean.
Misguided attempt at sarcasm. Why do you think China restricts travel from Wuhan province? Why do we have the concept of quarantene at all?
Crickets...
True, many people are gullible. However, looking at both sides I find that the typical consumers of fake media talking points are Trump haters. I assume there are tunnel-visioned Trump fans out there too, but I don´t really see many glaring example of parrotting blatant false talking points, like yours about Trump supposedly calling the virus a hoax. Simply looking at the source footage should clarify that.... instead many people simply parrot the fake CNN talking point.
So, why didn't Trump close the borders 2 weeks ago?
Quoting Nobeernolife
Do you have a mirror?
Because he is not perfect and does not have divine foresight? Like everybody else, apparently? Do you apply strict criteria to your preferred politician, whoever that is?
Too many crossed messages here, so I don´t know what your point was. In any case, what exactly exactly is the policy failure that you are criticising? Frankly, afaic, politicians are blundering all over in regard to this Corona thing, and since there are so many unknowns about it, this is a case where I can not blame them too much. (Except for the clowns at the WHO, who are so clearly and blatantly in China`s pocket)
So you think he made a mistake there? Everyone makes mistakes, right?
I do not know if he made a "mistake", and neither do you. He re-assured the public, appointed a Corona zar to coordinate the response, and ordered travel restrictions, all of which looks reasonab le to me. If better actions were possible, maybe, probably. But I do not automatically switch to "orangeman baaaad!!" mode like so many. (I.e. the CNN consumers)
I am not asking you if you "know" he made a mistake. I am asking you if you think he did. As in, do you think he should have taken different measures, and sooner, given the information you have.
You claim to be the reasonable and sane person here. Yet you refuse to give a clear answer to an innocuous question. "I think Trump made a mistake" isn't "Orange man bad".
I didn't say that Trump called the virus a hoax.
And if you want glaring examples of parroting blatant false talking points from Trump supporters, just look at their accusations re. Biden and Ukraine, or the FBI and Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign being some Deep State or Democrat conspiracy.
Now you got me totally confused? What are you implying here?
That it's a measure of EITHER the federal agencies OR local authorities handle the issue? That's nonsense!
Look, a central coordinator is needed when face a threat like a pandemic. Local authorities, workplaces and schools etc. can decide themselves what to do just as an individual can decide what to do. Yet tackling a pandemic simply isn't something ONLY left to the individual and various communities. It is about making a uniform quick response. To get ready for a possible larger outbreak. You ideological issues simply
Quoting NOS4A2
Because you utterly fail to understand the need for a concentrated effort that is simply necessitated by practical reasons here and is in no way a plot to undermine individual liberty or state/communal independence.
Just as it would be preposterous for every 50 states to create their own armed forces with their own command structures, own logistics systems etc without any unification and coordination, so it is whimsical to think that there wouldn't be synergy and genuine benefits in having a single federal institution like the CDC in preventing disease outbreaks and giving guidelines on what to do.
But I guess common sense doesn't mean a thing when it comes ideological issues, so this discussion is rather futile.
That's a bit harsh.
At least Trump has had the opportunity to get the corona-virus from an evil [s]European[/s] Latino foreigner:
Make Brazil Great again! Trump, Pence and a Corona-virus patient:
Dutch are nice people.
https://www.creditdonkey.com/world-hunger-statistics.html
Fortunately, starvation is not very contagious so we don't have to worry and the economy is unaffected. Hurrah!
As usual you’ve cherry picked, and in your efforts to remain blind to the rest of my argument didn’t realize I was speaking theoretically. As a famous American once said, “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity“.
Perhaps it’s best if you addressed what I said and not what you pretend I’ve implied. A central coordinator is not needed because if it makes one mistake the entire thing collapses.
I understand your obsequious desire for a central coordinator, but no I am unconvinced that we need one. Your “common sense” in my opinion is not common sense, but rather one degree or other of servility. But yes this is a purely ideological and we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
In times of crisis people need to do whatever needs to be done, even if doing it can be a little unsettling. Wasn't it some American leader or politician that said they would be willing to tip their hat top the devil to find out the conditions in hell?
Did I claim they don’t understand me? Nope. I said you cherry picked, and in your efforts to remain blind to the rest of my argument didn’t realize I was speaking theoretically. Do I need to dumb it down a little for you?
Quoting NOS4A2
Quoting NOS4A2
Quoting NOS4A2
So if your point now is "well, I'm just talking about a theoretical world" (while complaining about issues in the real world) then you really need to just fuck off and stop complaining about whatever any government is doing because they are actually dealing with facts.
Did I say anything wrong there?
I think journalism and a free press are deeply important, but the problem is you pretend my criticism of fake news in particular is an indictment on journalism in general. So not only do you cherry pick, but you are unable to differentiate between the simplest of concepts.
Trump can't admit that he needs testing, because it would weaken his machismo. Powerful populist leaders like him and Johnson have to remain invincible alpha males at all times, or they might fall to the level of all those weak marxist and communist leaders over there, on the other side. It's essential for Machiavellian divide and rule.
Off with their heads.
Wonderful irony if he does. He'll get a personal taste of what a hoax virus feels like. And, no, Don, it's not just like the flu. News I just read suggests Ivanka may be infected too.
But anyway, I do see a coherent position in NOS4A2's analysis. It is actually very coherent. He, (or 'you' NOS4A2, I don't like talking about you as if you are not there, but I am also addressing other so forgive the 'he') holds a libertarian position which is generally not based on the public good but on personal liberty. Libertarians see government infringements as inherently suspect because it harms personal freedom and since we are on the world to be free and not slaves, this is an inherent wrong. That is why arguing from the common good against this position is generally pointless. It holds a different frame of reference.
However NOS4A2 seems to hold to a more strong position. also implying that citizens if left to their own devices are more capable of making informed choices than can governments who take decisions for them. The idea is based on the principle of subsidiarity, decisions at the local level need to be taken locally. The most intimate decisions such as about health are very local. In the end this principle boils down to a minimalist government indeed who's role is no more than safeguarding the individual freedom of choice, because the individual knows best. That is if this individual has full information, hence the important role for journalism and the press. They should present the public with unbiassed information so they can make optimal choices, efficiently allocate goods through the market. So far the position is perfectly coherent.
The only problem is there is a weakness in it and that is that some decisions require collective action and then decisions need to be coordinated. To give an example: when in summer European decide en masse to drive south for holiday, they have to traverse the city of Paris with its congested roads. They can travel around it but it takes longer. When it is very congested though it might be worth your while. Now in NOS4A2's libertarian world with full information the following would happen. Drivers set out and they learn that the roads in paris are severely congested. They know the roads, they know the detours and they all hear it is a mess in Paris and being the economically efficient people they are they take the detour. Lo and behold the traffic in Paris clears but the side roads get terribly clogged. they might by now all calculate and decide to turn back but they end up in just as severe mass because they all follow the same type of reasoning and all have full information.
It is not so difficult to se what good a central traffic authority regulating the flows would do in such a case. Collective action problems, like preventing a pandemic, are problems that are best coordinated on higher levels. This increases legal certainty for the citizens, make sure they do not run into different rules to which they need to adapt in several different regions, the necessary resources can be quickly allocated preventing every minute territory hoarding its supplies for itself and all kinds of other advantages of scale. I do not disagree with the principle of subsidiarity, but I do disagree with the rather absolute veneration for individual rights over collective ones. I simply do not see from whence it follows. If that falls it is easy to see that having a government taking care of collective action problems is a very sound idea.
PS that is exactly why Trump's travel ban is so silly. Next to no case in the US are traceable to Europe, but he misses out on opportunities to cooperate, choosing to harm his people in fact for political gain. If he was serious about travel restriction, as said not itself such a bad idea, restrict inter state travel and indeed keep the outbreaks in states and coordinate action together with state and central government for optimal efficiency... pragmatic policy is not that difficult...
I appreciate the fair analysis of my arguments. It’s a rarity around here, it seems.
There is not much I can object to, but a few points which may be cause for discussion.
I do not think the individual knows best, only that he knows what’s best for himself and his own interests. I do not think think this principle precludes collective action. After all, collectives are composed of individuals, and it is in our nature to cooperate with others and engage in common enterprise.
I also think we should be wary of equivocating between a central authority and collective action. This, to me, seems like a contradiction in terms, just by the fact that a vast majority of the collective, of individuals, are not a part of the central authority and left out of any decision making, often to the detriment of their own interests and liberties. My main contention on this point is that individuals can indeed band together to form, say, a traffic agency, but that they can do so without monopolizing their authority. I’m not (yet) a proponent of free market roads, but perhaps a sort of pluralism of authorities would suffice, though I haven’t really given it enough thought of how that might work in practice, so I will concede to your point about traffic.
As for a pandemic, I do not see how a central authority is the only answer to fighting it. Individual actions such as washing hands and staying away from crowds are more than enough to suppress the spread of virus, no state-sanctioned suppression of movement or gatherings are required. The question is whether individuals are informed and responsible enough to perform these actions, and of that we can almost be sure that they are not.
But I think the pandemic will reveal a lot in regards to the central authority approach to combatting it. The CCP, one of the most powerful central authorities in world history, still bungled their efforts and suppressed the rights of countless millions in order to do so. Italy’s world-renowned government healthcare system is overwhelmed, and the people are on lockdown. The heavy-handed approach to mitigation may be effective, but at what cost and at whose expense?
Again, thanks for the fair shake.
Coronavirus Quarantine Survivor Keeps Coughing on TV
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5PXh4U8CJs
Tennessee parents take extreme measures over novel coronavirus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOPvuGZO_Fs
Guy suggests giving everyone coronavirus to spare the economy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEU-Bk0gMi4
Operations Dashboard for Coronavirus COVID-19 Cases WorldWide
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
Journalist goes undercover at wet markets where the Coronavirus started | 60 Minutes Australia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7nZ4mw4mXw
Doctor Fact-Checks Media On Coronavirus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CRxyHU9Oxo&t
Full Fauci: For Coronavirus And Crowds, 'If You're A Vulnerable Person, Take It Seriously'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvhvZS1rUCQ
Infectious disease epidemiologist answers questions about coronavirus COVID-19
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwuNglv8PLA
Updated: Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro Denies Reports He Tested Positive For Coronavirus After Trump Meeting
Guess Trump was right. Godspeed, EU.
Covid-19, SARS, MERS, Swineflu, Birdflu, all originated from animals (many wild ones) and the zoonosis seems to be something quite ordinary now days. Animals that otherwise wouldn't be in contact with humans is the reason for these new outbreaks and the reason issue why this thing has to be handled with international cooperation. Awareness and information ought to change habits.
I bet, if for some reason, black rats would be a local traditional delicacy in Arizona, you would get the occasional bubonic plague epidemic in the US. Now it's just single cases then and now. And how much people wash their hands in Minnesota wouldn't simply wouldn't be the answer.
[tweet]https://twitter.com/abc/status/1238556513708453889?s=21[/tweet]
Two birds, one stone.
""And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.""
Trump, Feb 26
That's the day Trump lost the election.
Lol.
Says the guy who was just moments ago was so against federal coordinated responses (because they could go wrong) and was to leave it to local authorities and individuals. :mask:
As a species, we're doomed.
Did I say I was for it? Because I cannot see where I did. Perhaps you just made it up.
That’s quite false, according to Tony Fauci. The system didn’t allow for mass testing, he said, that we needed to include the private sphere, which they just announced during his most recent press conference. The administration fixed the testing problem.
You can see it at the 39 minute mark here:
Of course the press misinterpreted his earlier statements to say it was this administration that was failing. Simply untrue.
So I guess after this weekend Europe could have closed borders all around.
I have heard that Italy is the only country doing extensive post-mortem tests in all cases of respiratory illness of some kind.
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/685d0ace521648f8a5beeeee1b9125cd
Yes, it took a stock market crash for the disgusting prick to do anything. :vomit:
Your welcome. :D
Amusing that a servile sycophant of the head of government who is on this site almost exclusively to spread pro-Whitehouse propaganda is lecturing us about individual responsibility, liberty, and mistrust of government. You literally do almost nothing here but spin the government line and posts links favourable to Whitehouse positions. Maybe you're being deliberately ironic or something but you're an absurd parody of everything you pretend to believe in.
Do they teach you to attack the player and not the ball where you’re from? Because this sort of harassment is not very convincing to say the least.
I almost hate hoarders more than sycophants. Just how many shits can one dude take?
All anyone has to do to know what I said is true is to read your posts. And servile tools of the government pretending to be in favour of liberty/individuality etc should be called out for their hypocrisy on every platform they pollute. So, stop whining and get back to telling us how wonderful this Whitehouse is.
It's quite false there was a testing problem and they fixed the testing problem.
Makes perfect sense. I can see why people get frustrated enough to swear at you.
When you said the testing problem was a fiasco I figured you were adopting the fake news that it was Trump’s fault. I apologize if I was mistaken.
This whole thread is littered with anti-Trump propaganda. I’ve tried my hardest to limit my Trump talk to the Trump thread out of respect for the other posters, but I figured a little push back was necessary since some are using anti-Trump propaganda to wish infection on Trump supporters. That’s fine, but the fact I get berated for offering a more positive take is quite telling.
No, this thread and others contain valid criticisms of your government. And you are a government tool doing propaganda and nothing more. At least stop pretending you mistrust government etc. Nobody on this thread trusts and tries to get others to trust the Whitehouse more than you. You do it in an absurd Hannity-type way that only rabbit-level IQs would swallow, but you do it anyway.
I’m not sure in which world name-calling and puke emojis and wishing disease on Trump supporters are “valid criticisms”, but I think I’ve shown that they were not only false, but also ripe with group think and paranoia. I, on the other hand, opposed one of Trump’s policies in this very thread. So the selective and one-sided treatment is apparent. Either way, I will do my best to try harder.
Perhaps you can remind me how you dream of castration again.
I didn't claim every criticism was valid. But you respond to even valid criticisms with Whitehouse spin. Maybe inside the government propaganda shell that you've trapped yourself in there's a real person with his own opinions. Maybe.
I have not once used whitehouse spin, Fox News opinion articles, info wars or anything like that. At worst I’ve offered the other side of the story, which is oddly missing from any argument. I honestly thought I was offering more nuance to the general hatred and contempt.
I think it’s my general disposition. As you might suspect I’m a marketplace of ideas kind of guy and I like debate for its own sake. Perhaps that rubs people the wrong way and for that I apologize, but I actually do have conviction in what I say. Anyways, again, I will try harder. Such a topic demands at least a little respect to those who may be affected by the pandemic.
OK, then if it's true that Trump delayed testing because he thought it would cause negative media coverage and damage to his chances to reelection. In other words, if it is true that he put his own political interests above public health interests, what would your reaction be? Here's your chance not to give the Whitehouse spin or avoid the question. Take it on. Answer it.
All he needs to do is give a sign that he's willing.
:lol:
My initial thought is that sounds like an untrue claim, but I am willing to be proven otherwise.
You didn't answer the question. If it is true then what's your reaction?
I would be disappointed.
Sorry, what was it? You dream of people hurting your wife and child?
And if it was a Democrat preferring Americans died to risking an election loss, you would be... ? Just disappointed. Isn't it a little more serious than that?
Everything we take for granted is dependent on the prosperity that comes with cheap energy; a finite resource. The present corporate economy is the great exploiter of that cheap (although becoming ever more expensive) energy, and out prosperity is, in real terms, diminishing, even though that reality is currently still disguised by the generation of credit. All in all a very fragile system and situation.
I mean if he said he preferred Americans would die because he didn’t want to lose an election then he would lose my support immediately. But somehow I suspect that isn’t the case. Is it?
Nobody said anything about anyone "saying" anything. You don't come out and admit that, obviously. Plus, you didn't at all answer the question I put to you in the post you replied to. This is where the rabbit-level-IQ bait and switch comes in. It's transparent, annoying, and a typical tactic of government spin-doctors. And if you keep doing it, we'll continue to keep presuming you are one.
Ok, then how do you know he prefers Americans would die rather than lose an election?
I'll ask you again, to what extent is the President concerned for the wellbeing of US troops in what is soon going to become a hell hole in the Middle East and Asia?
According to him he is quite concerned, probably more so than any leader before him.
You're still doing it. Again, this tactic is not going to work on anyone here. I asked you a hypothetical then followed up with another. You've twice avoided the second hypothetical. Here it is again:
Quoting Baden
If you want to suggest you're not a government propaganda artist, answer the question. If you are, continue playing games.
Sorry, am I missing something here?
If a Democrat preferred Americans died to risking election loss I’d be yelling “lock him up” as they took him to prison. Is that a better answer?
Yes, so to be consistent, you'd have to be yelling "lock him up" if Trump was guilty of the same. Now all we have to do is gather enough evidence that he is.
:lol:
Sure. So did he say this? Imply it? What is it? I’ve avoided the news today so I sincerely have no clue what you’re talking about.
My apologies.
I posted about this earlier today quoting from an interview on NPR. The full story isn't out yet. But I'll dig it up later and/or post more when there's more conclusive evidence forthcoming.
It was interesting to see what they ran out of. Bread, eggs, toilet paper, and rice were all gone. Seafood, canned beans, yogurt, and cheese were plentiful. I bought some precooked hot wings, which is my staple survival food during coronavirus scares.
My prediction is that no one here will die or lose a close family member to the virus. If they do, I'll look like a dick for saying this, but that's the risk I'm willing to take, putting my nice guy reputation on the line.
As to whether Trump did a good job responding to this virus, meh. It's not like if diagnostic tests were readily available, the average American would get tested, and even if they tested positive would they let anyone know, and they'd doubtfully quarantine themselves.
From my end, I've been licking handrails, doorknobs, and stripper poles, and I got nothing but open mouth sores to show for it.
That's absolutely the case. Most cities in the world (or the USA) do not have many empty hospital beds just waiting to be filled by people sick with covid-19. They also don't have a cadre of surplus staff just waiting to be called in for emergencies. They are operating at something not too far below capacity. A surge of infectious disease cases will swamp hospital systems, at least initially. People who are sick, but not requiring hospitalization, can self-isolate themselves at home -- at least for a while (assuming there are services available to deliver food or medicine, should they run out.
Nursing homes are, for sure, a weak link in the system. The residents are highly vulnerable, can't leave, and need daily care
Virus-ready.
Lol OK :lol:
I don't know, of course, but the epidemic could be worse than we think it will be. It depends on how much community transmission occurs -- disease spread locally from person to person, rather than people showing up sick who had been in Milan or Wuhan. We don't have experience with this virus, and so... could be that next fall will be the beginning of the major calamity, rather than right now. Who knows?
The thing is, people who get sick with Covid-19 can get very, very sick, and end up with permanently damaged lungs if they are able to survive. The range of sickness for those who don't get very very sick can still include pneumonia.
Quoting Hanover
You should have a bidet.
In Thailand you get bidet faucets and paper. West needs to catch up.
:eyes: :party:
Speaking of that, does the coranavirus cause a gent to piss out his asshole? If it does, I might rethink my casual attitude about it. I hate hearing that firehose sound behind the bathroom door, knowing someone is feeling that burning spray out their rectum.
Speaking of that, how do you guys wipe an irritated ass pucker? Do you grin and bear it with a quick hard wipe or do you stroke it quickly as if writing Morse code, maybe sending an SOS to your netherlands?
Yup. All we need is something to dry off with...
:lol:
That can be a hand towel, and ought be during a toilet paper shortage because it takes quite a bit of that to dry off...
Due to the fear, many things are being cancelled, including public schools in some places.
Those poor parents with kids who cannot look after themselves... the unexpected and often dramatic increase in childcare expenses...
Wonder if Trump plans to help them with his stimulus spending?
Just doing some poking around and had clear up some misinformation. You even had me convinced for a second there.
https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/cdc-budget.jpg
“Just because Ziemer’s position was discontinued does not mean everyone who was part of the team was fired or that all of the functions of the directorate ceased. According to reporting by the Atlantic and the Washington Post, some team members were shifted to other groups, and others took over some of Ziemer’s duties. An NSC spokesman at the time said that the administration “remains committed to global health, global health security and biodefense, and will continue to address these issues with the same resolve under the new structure.”
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/democrats-misleading-coronavirus-claims/
“ As the COVID-19 disease caused by the new coronavirus has spread around the world, a number of politicians, news organizations and public figures have made the false claim that the Trump administration cut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s anti-pandemic work in over 40 countries to just 10. The CDC told us that’s not true.
...
With its current funding, Bartee said, the CDC is actually working in “more than 60 countries” — not 10 — to address the threat of global infectious diseases and outbreaks.“
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/false-claim-about-cdcs-global-anti-pandemic-work/
OK, thanks for clarifying. Anyway, this fake media talking point is out there.
Quoting Michael
Not sure what you mean there. Both the Russia hoax and the Ukraine hoax are perpetrated by the fake media and repeated by the gullible Trump haters.... not sure why you are confirming my point, but thanks.
Comprehension problems? I said I do not know if he made a mistake, seeing that the whole Corona situation is still so unclear. And neither do you. The only reason you "know" that he made a mistake is that in a simple world of orangeman bad, you just "know" that whatever the orange monster does is a mistake.
Simple rules for simple minds...
Yes, I agree that he's concerned, about the pandemic, not about his troops though, they are off the radar for now. Oh and also any US citizens in vulnerable countries*. He's displaying the behaviour of someone in a sticky situation way above his pay grade. Let's hope he's got some level headed advisors left, after his purge of people he doesn't like around him.
All he's doing is desperately being all things to all men. Contradicting what he said the last time he spoke, distracting from hard questions, attacking and othering anyone, or administration he can pin a target on. He hasn't even realised that leaders around the world are struggling to comprehend and deal with the magnitude of the crisis. He just sits there with his arms tightly crossed and reacts to events in anyway that he can do with his salesman rhetoric.
Where's the leadership?
Or, do you still not know what I mean by leadership?
* I mean countries with poor healthcare systems, which are poorly prepared for 10% of their population to require hospital treatment in the next few weeks.
Even if the WHO has declared Europe of the epicenter of COVID-19 the US isn't that much better off. As of today according to the New York Times:
"The number of known coronavirus cases in the United States continues to grow rapidly. As of Saturday morning, at least 2,170 people in 49 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico have tested positive for coronavirus, according to a New York Times database, and at least 48 patients with the virus have died."
(Link to map of where cases of reported coronavirus are in the US)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Ot-lkZSQ1Bpjs2cXbbyAfxllRPrEc6Ia/view
It looks like country after country in Europe are starting to close it's borders with each other in the hopes of slowing down the spread of the virus. The US might soon follow suit with locking down certain areas as quarantine zones in order to slow down the spread here in the US. We will have to see what places outside the US and Europe will choose to do when infection rates become too high for their countries. Needless to say the economic costs of all of this is going to be staggering not to mention the human costs after this is all done ..if we are ever truly done with it.
That's real progress. You have glimpsed for a single second what removing propaganda beliefs from your mind looks like.
Perhaps there is hope for you yet.
I don't have much time at the moment, lot's to do to reorganize my organization's strategy in light of the pandemic. However, I live in a Nordic country precisely because public policy, institutions, individuals in those institutions, and culture are the most resilient to this sort of event, which has been viewed as inevitable by the community that does the relevant systems analysis of global stability.
I moved here over 10 years ago (before the 2008 financial crash, that I also knew was coming and was discussing on the previous forum in 2006; although a big risk, clearly solvable by printing money, but one never knows). Why build something long term somewhere if the location is not resilient to global disruptions that are mathematically guaranteed?
Now at that time I lived in Canada, which has a lot of the same institutions and cooperative culture as the European countries ... but is next to the US with lot's of interdependence. Additionally, at that time, there was a conservative government in Canada with a "crazy light" version of the tea-party beliefs, so I could also not be sure those institutions would remain for long. So, on the whole, not a risk worth taking (unless my goal was to "fight the good fight" in Canada, which it isn't, I have have much more important things to do, and a stable home-base is a critical criteria to be able to do my work over the long term in order to accumulate the value).
I provide this little anecdote as food for thought of the advantages of unbiased critical thinking: strategic decisions can mitigate adverse events literally decades away. Because I live in a Nordic country, I have few worries in this situation. There has not even been any panic buying; plenty of toilet paper still at the shop yesterday, and I bought only one package as I would normally do. Why? Because everyone here knows society will continue to function pretty well even in severe crisis because the government design makes sense and is filled with high-competence individuals running all the institutions we could possibly want in this situation; if there is a resource shortage, critical resources will be distributed in a reasonable way in a timely and organized manner, and neighbors will help each other out for the small stuff rather than, say ... hmm, I don't know, riot because of running out of money without any of the institutions that are needed to be already in place to take care of vulnerable members society in good times (because of a moral duty to them) and in bad times (because the breakdown of society isn't good for anyone, and forcing a lot of people to live "on the edge" is ripe pickings for social breakdown when a strong gust pushes them over; rioting and crime are a completely reasonable response if there is no reasonable social contract to point to, only coercive submission to sign the dotted line; and the riots and the crime, will be coming quick, since young hooligans fear not the virus but will find it very interesting that a lot of old people are suddenly "away from home" and the authorities are distracted, followed by marshal law not far behind and lot's of gun injuries to treat on-top of the virus; but we'll see how crime plays out in the US compared to the Nordics, we'll need to check in on this later too). If I'm right, there's not really any safe place to be, which is why, the time to "get the hell out of dodge" was over a decade ago as to be able to build up new social relations in a more stable place. Yes, I've paid higher taxes, especially for a CEO of a corporation compared to my counterparts in the US (remembering even the taxes they do pay and aren't hidden in offshore arrangement, a large part goes to inefficient imperial financing even if you want empire, such as storing new tanks in the desert or paying mercenaries absurd fees, so this must be discounted in a fair analysis; for in terms of defense, mandatory conscription is effective and inexpensive) ... but, since I don't run a fortune 500 country I can't go to some bunker on a island, and so I believe many of my counter-parts will soon be of the opinion that it's difficult to put a price on a reasonable government design -- that they weren't "long term greedy" enough.
But let's check in on these predictions in a few weeks time.
As for you're "clearing things up".
You are confusing "words" with "other words" that aren't the same thing.
The Fortune article I cite, yes does refer to a budget cut for the CDC in 2019 that is also in your graph. Note that 2019 is before 2020, the year we are now in. Also note that "cutting the budget" to get rid of non-corrupt people, and then increasing the budget as a favour to the cronies now in charge is classic corruption tactics. Trump has been increasing the budget deficit to a trillion, so the "fiscal responsibility" of republicans is not really the issue, the issue is corrupt use of all that money, which requires, from time to time, getting rid of competent managers through temporary budget measures.
But that's not the important part for people who know how to think.
Quoting NOS4A2
For a critical thinker, the obvious implication Rear Admiral Ziemer quitting is that he is protesting mismanagement, such as, perhaps, the head of the CDC and FDA being replaced by sycophants.
It's not just a budget question. Mismanagement is much worse than budget cuts; and the implication of Ziemers (without a hand-off to a replacement) is that the whole thing is starting to stink, and he won't be apart of it.
Now, Fortune can't say this because there's Ziemer didn't go into the behind the scenes details (he will certainly be doing that at a congressional hearing sooner or later), but it's assumed by critical thinkers that competent people quitting an organization unexpectedly is an extremely negative sign.
Likewise, any critical thinker does not conclude that "his team being disbanded" is easily mitigated by moving some of those people elsewhere and adding "defend against global pandemic" to various job descriptions.
A team is more than the sum of it's parts.
Furthermore, the Fortune article is specifically talking about running out of budget of the pandemic program. That a program loses budget does not mean that the institution as a whole loses budget, the money can be put elsewhere (in thing like, oh I don't know, corrupt handouts to friends).
I don't know why you want to cover Trump's ass on this issue, but I can assure you it's just too big on this occasion. The crisis has been clearly developing since January, and only a few days ago Trump seemed to believe that keeping people on the cruise ship would have some impact on the "numbers" (rather than being a drop in the exponentially expanding bucket), that the numbers staying low by a gimmick of keeping people on a ship was a good plan, and that saying such a stupid analysis of things out loud doesn't just betray total ignorance and incompetence and "losing grip on the situation" but also a complete lack of caring for the people on-board.
He went from downplaying it as similar magnitude as the flu ... to banning all flights from Europe (too late for containment) and calling an emergency.
If you read my comments because "you were almost convinced", remember that I started when containment was still possible and the "official policy" ... but, true to critical thinking form, I accurately predicted that containment was actually abandoned as a policy since policy makers thought "letting it burn through the population" would, yes kill a lot of people, but keep things normal and the stock market humming; because, under normal circumstances, sacrificing people's health for the stock market is completely usual and ordinary decision to make (because the cause and effect are sufficiently separated that a large portion of the population can be made to believe poison isn't bad, maybe even good for them ... or, at least, the free market feeding people poison is good for investors, maybe even some God given right).
Read my first comment I posted here carefully:
Quoting boethius
Two years ago I predicted Trump was totally secure against impeachment removing him as he clearly had the Republican party by their sweaty balls as well as having the few women senators in there "grabbed by the pussy". This prediction has already proved to be correct.
I also predicted: "supporting an incompetent statesman who falls in love with dictators is not necessarily a good future for any American, including Republicans" and that "governments filled with loyal sycophants simply lose their grip on the situation".
So, let's check-in in a few weeks what you think of these predictions after this "foreign virus" hits closer to home.
I have more time now, as I've solved my organizational strategy problems.
What you haven't followed about this conversation is that we have been discussing an evolving situation. When we started, containment measures were still possible to significantly slow the global spread of the virus. You were arguing that "stopping flights", the obvious and effective tool to maintain a global containment strategy, would have higher costs than benefits.
Obviously, in hindsight it's easy to change your position to "oh, oh, yes it would have been useful then, I wasn't saying stopping flights would not be a reasonable cost to pay to stop the pandemic. But when we started discussing, stopping flights was still feasible to slow the pandemic. If that was your position, why didn't you say so? (hint: it wasn't your position)
Moreover, we were discussing my point that flights should have been stopped even before then when it was still possible to mostly contain to China, even in December when the first cases of a new SARS virus was known (that China covered it up as long as possible, which is just even more reason to ban all flight as soon as we do know as we shouldn't trust China to tell us the extent of the problem; they fooled us once with SARS-1, now fooled us again with SARS-2! how is that possible!! but this isn't aimed at you, but the bureaucrats who thought letting China have their way about lights would be better for the stock market anyway). That the sooner flights are stopped to maintain containment, not only the better for containment, but the better for the air industry as things can continue more normally elsewhere (compared to continuing flights, letting containment fail, and create the situation now where there are flight bans and collapse in air travelers on top of the far more devastating affects of global and simultaneous pandemic).
So, what were your points about the economic cost of stopping flying actually about? Which windows, starting in December when the first cases were known, until now was stopping flying a bad idea due to the economic costs of that and when was it a good idea? And please cite yourself saying so when we started discussing this topic.
Or rather, your position was clearly stopping flights was a high cost and it was reasonable to let flights continue, as you did not realize what the pandemic meant. Now that you do, you've reconfigured your belief system to believe that you can plausibly switch positions without it being obvious.
But it is obvious, it's bad faith, and simply foolish to not just admit you were wrong about stopping flights something to be economically worried about. You should admit that my position that stopping the flights has a very small, easily managed cost, compared to the benefits of maintaining containment as long and as well as possible.
So, when exactly, when we started discussing, did you mention that you were "for stopping flights" in a containment strategy, but are only advocating keeping flights open once containment has failed (which it had not yet done when we started discussing) and it's too late to have significant impact now.
So, you're certainly now against Trump's ban of flights from Europe?
As for the depopulation.
My position is that there's no "feasible" way to depopulate, I was clear the first time and re-explained a second time.
So when you say:
Quoting Janus
My question is "how do you feasibly do that?"; how do you feasibly euthanaze 80 or 90 percent of the population.
Now, your original comment was:
[quote=Janus]The basic problem, that which is creating the conditions for runaway capitalism, industrial farming practices, resource depletion, soil, land and ocean degradation and pollution, is overpopulation. [/quote]
When you say "the basic problem" that implies that that's the basic problem to solve; that action should be taken about the basic problem, which you are proposing is population.
My counter argument was that of Impact = Population x Technology x Affluence, we cannot feasibly act on population, but we can on Technology and Affluence. I.e. that the basic problem is technology and affluence, not population.
Now if by "problem" you mean "something that can't feasibly be solved" and therefore is simply a condition and not a problem. I completely agree that a high population is a necessary condition to get to high impact with our current technology and affluence configurations.
Of course, if you don't really understand what you're saying nor really understand what I say in response, I'd say that's not following the conversation doubly so.
Re-read carefully out exchange from the beginning and try to remember that the situation when we started is not the situation we have now. At what point do your points about "stopping flying would have terrible economic implications" make any sense. Are you saying that now Trump banning flights from Europe will have those terrible consequences? Or not now but if he did it last week or next week? Or are you arguing that flights shouldn't be banned only before the crisis started and then only after the crisis is resolved, but that for sure flights should have been stopped in a reasonable containment strategy? I.e. you agree with my position all along.
I know that they are being advised by some of the world's top epidemiologists, but there is a growing suspicion that the government is limiting the strategy to one of a number of models provide by them. The model of blunting, or smoothing out the peak of the epidemic while accepting that at least 80% of the population will become infected anyway. In the aim that this degree of infection will generate a heard immunity and subsequently smooth out any following peaks.
Many people consider this a gamble, a risky strategy, which in the light of the lack of understanding of the virus could go horribly wrong in the initial peak of infection.
The charge against the government is that they have been advised about the fragile state of the economy and the critical degree of underfunding and recruitment crisis (Brexit) within the health system. That they are scarred of such collapse during the critical Brexit period and rather have adopted this strategy to put the strain on the risk of hundreds of thousands of old people instead. Well they are all going to die soon anyway.
Make Britain great again.
Quoting StreetlightX
Oh there too? What on Earth is it with people hoarding toilet paper? Happened here too. It's not a cholera epidemic. It's just crazy.
Quoting Hanover
In all seriousness, that is what probability theory would say. It is quite likely that it's going to be rather rare (but not impossible) to get down with a serious corona infection (needing hospital level care) with the precautions and the attitudes now taken. Of course everybody now having flu symptoms will be careful. And as flu is quite common, we will have our corona-scares.
I've said that it's unlikely that the virus will kill one million people in the World. The pre-emptive measure now taken after the swineflu pandemic simply are so dramatic. Just for comparison (that we have a scale on how deadly diseases are) heart disease and cancer combined kill about 1,2 million annually only in the US. If you would make the prediction, Hanover, of no one here will die or lose a close family member to heart disease or cancer, you would by 0,99+ probability be wrong.
If the first wave of the epidemic in China has infections is really going down now by extremely drastic measures and you have deaths in the thousands in a country of 1 billion, that's is few. If (when) it jumps ten times after one year from now, that's still few.
In a way it does show we do value human life.
Shoppers charged over toilet paper brawl | Nine News Australia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1nEnOmC6IQ
How Costco is Handling Panicked Coronavirus Shoppers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsF6ezLOMC4
Effects of Coronavirus Panic Reach Far and Wide
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pAcWPZRVSo
Any thoughts on how this whole toilet paper craze got started? By now it's clearly a self-reinforcing cycle. But at some point, someone must have figured that the one thing they'll need in case they are cut off from supplied is toilet paper. Lots of toilet paper.
Once something is going off the shelves and we use it on a daily basis, the hoarding starts.
I think people are 1) afraid of a Italian / Chinese style lock down and 2) if they do get flu symptoms, the best thing is to have this self-imposed quarantine and not go to daily shopping. And then there's the "collapse of civilization" crowd...
Quoting Punshhh
Sounding like Trump few weeks ago on the corona issue. But ultimately people will have enough of toilet paper. :razz:
Yeah, but how did it start going off the shelves in the first place? I understand what is happening now, in terms of the psychology involved, but I don't get how it started.
I believe it is partly caused by people feeling like they no longer have control over their lives and (at least for now) they have some control what they can buy it seems like "buying toilet paper" has become an outlet for people to funnel their energy into instead of biting their nails or grasping at pearls, although I'm pretty sure they are doing that now. It might also help to know that during the Spanish Influenza people where given shots that only vitamins in them (ie a placebo) in order to help remove some of the anxiety people where experiencing since they didn't have a vaccine at the time.
Although I think observation is valid, there is also a numbers explanation that toilet paper takes up a lot of shelf space with little value density, so things are optimized to be "just enough" in both the front and the back storage ... and the regional storage as well. So, even a slight up tick due to people "stocking up" creates a depletion of toilet paper first in certain locations, which then causes the run on toilet paper in other locations as word gets around, and then social media drives the phenomena globally. A reddit poster clued me into this; toilet paper dynamics was not something I previously identified as a global important phenomena, but I've been trying to lean quick.
However, there's also a symbolic explanation that people realize the shits hitting the fan, metaphorically, and the toilet paper buying is a symbolic talisman of sorts that offers some protection.
I disagree here. I think you're giving BJ too much credit. You've let him wank your chain, if only a bit, which is preventing you from fully penetrating the thin veil separating the world view of the noble steeds from the common ass.
Framed this way they have "taken responsible and serious measures, well informed" and yes "it's a gamble, but there are risks either way".
This narrative is quite clearly being constructed now simply as a cover up to the initial incompetence of downplaying it.
If you read what Boris and co. were saying before, they are quite clear in their theory that "it's only a bad flue". UK was first to officially abandon containment, with the explicit logic that "it's not so bad", they were quite proud of their heroic complacency in favour of the economy.
I think a better explanation is that Boris and co. simply weren't alarmed by the prospect of "old people dying" and so minimized it, and by the time they did learn from the experts why it shouldn't be minimized: oopsy too late. Sowy, so, so sooowwy.
They are trying to transition towards the inevitable by pretending to make an intermediate step designed to make the previous mistakes look like well intentioned thought-out policy.
The theory I have been developing here, is that the neoliberal ideology is not equipped to deal with a situation where lives cannot be sacrificed for the stock market. Usually they can, because most conflicts between people's lives and the stock market are over a long enough period of time for propaganda to intervene. Why isn't everyone killed then? @NOS4A2 might ask innocently. Well, everyone may very well be killed for the stock market, the century is still young, but why it hasn't happened yet is because there is an optimum between keeping people alive in order to be consumers, sick consumers needing long term medical products ideally, and unregulated business to maximize externalities and thus profit (the world functions fairly close to this optimum).
These people are not only corrupt but lazy. To slow a pandemic requires "being on it" and not "seeing how it plays out elsewhere". Yes, they did hear expert advice, but my guess is their reply kept on being "yes, yes, let's meet again in a week and see where things are. No, no, we're not doing something drastic, run along now". No one had a model that inaction would actually be worse for the stock market, so they assumed the denialist propaganda was an adequate position as -- well, if anything their own base believes it, and what's true or false normally doesn't matter to their base -- and "letting old people die to reduce pensions and health care costs" generated on the right was actually true, so is, wink wink, a fiscally responsible thing (they forgot that it's important to tell the difference between truth and their own bullshit from time to time).
What also might be feeding the toilet paper frenzy is the news and social media talking about the toilet paper frenzy. Many items have been sold out for weeks now (ie dust mask, hand sanitizers, gloves,etc) which in and of themselves isn't that newsworthy but the idea of a run on toilet paper is pretty comical and gives some insight into how crazy the situation might be if out of all things for a store to run out of. Only in a zombie apocalypse (or some other apocalypse for that matter) would there be a need for people to stock up on 4 to 6 months worth of toilet paper. Also if one has that much toilet paper on hand but no food or water I don't think all that toilet paper will be that useful. However since most people can't afford to stock on half a year worth of food,water, medical supplies they might be able to buy half a years worth of toilet paper.
So in the end it may be a exacerbating feedback process that is fueled by social media, news, panic buying and the fact that people can afford to buy months worth of toilet paper whether they need it not plus the fact as pointed out by boethius that a pallet of toilet paper isn't really that much so even if just a few people start buying extra toilet paper then a store quickly runs out. However the same can be said of dust mask, hand sanitizers, gloves since such items where not commodities that where often needed before the corona virus outbreak.
A prank like that is almost as bad as shouting "fire" in a movie theater considering the state of the world we live in nowadays but it would be still a little humorous if it is one of the things that started all of this.
For instance, CNN just published a piece entitled "What does Britain know about coronavirus that the rest of Europe doesn't?" which is (for critical thinkers) basically pointing fun at UK leaders at oblivious morons.
They then just changed the headline on the front page, however, to "UK is taking a big gamble on Coronavirus".
Why the change? because someone executive got a swift "that's not the narrative you fool!".
Anyways, when even CNN can't help themselves to pointing out the transparent inconsistency of UK's policy changes.
[quote=CNN; https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/13/uk/uk-coronavirus-response-boris-johnson-intl-gbr/index.html]
Flanked by the country's chief scientific and medical advisers, the Prime Minister announced that his government was moving to the "delay" phase of its plan to tackle the outbreak, and warned Britons that they were facing their "worst public health crisis for a generation" and should be prepared "to lose loved ones before their time."
And yet, faced with such grave prospects, would the UK be taking the same stringent precautions as other affected countries? No, was the answer. At least not for now.[/quote]
As the UK will soon realize, "delaying" requires measures to actually achieve. You can't just say "delay" in order to cause a delay.
[Quote=CNN;https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/13/uk/uk-coronavirus-response-boris-johnson-intl-gbr/index.html]
But many prominent members of the medical community are unconvinced by the government's approach. Doctors on the front line of intensive care units have warned about the potential lack of respirators, as seen in Italy and China when cases peaked there, and said that if staff become sick themselves, access to experienced labor could become a problem.
The editor-in-chief of the influential journal The Lancet criticized the UK's response to the crisis. "To avoid an unmanageable catastrophe in the UK, we need to be honest about what seems likely to happen in coming weeks. We need urgent surge capacity in intensive care. The NHS is not prepared," Richard Horton tweeted Thursday.
"I am not being alarmist. What is happening in Italy is real and taking place now. Our government is not preparing us for that reality. We need immediate and assertive social distancing and closure policies. We need to prepare the NHS. This is a serious plea."
[/quote]
So, I don't think "listening to the experts" but "taking a gamble" is what's been going on, but rather incompetent inaction, perhaps to cover up and spin as best as can be done the latest pedophile scandal left little room for other government issues, and now that this pesky virus thing is a crisis (which blame will inevitably fall on those in charge) those in charge are desperately trying their propaganda tricks anyways, prepare their base to believe their "loved ones" died for a noble cause and everything was taken "seriously, very seriously" at every step.
It's perfectly consistent that the leader that brought "Get Brexit Done" thought it was a good idea to "Get Virus Done".
It is attractive to believe that people with a lot of power who say and do obviously stupid things are "actually smart" and don't actually believe obviously stupid things and, maybe ignore long term risks that "we don't know about for sure" but certainly would be capable and astute faced with short term risks to the entire system and their political careers. However, it's an all or nothing epistemology; to sell lies one must believe those lies even if one knew they were lies in the beginning. Propagandists always fall victim to their own propaganda time and time again throughout history: the pandemic is the low probability and high impact systemic risk these people have been pointing their propaganda at for decades, painting anyone who points out these sorts of "vulnerabilities" as "alarmist", which of course generally works as the risk is low so doesn't likely manifest right away, but, over time, leads them to believe their propaganda is actually true and that capitalism really does "work efficiently".
[quote=theguardian]
Live: Spain prepares for lockdown as WHO question's UK's "herd immunity" strategy
[/quote]
Turns out the pandemic experts haven't heard of this approach as a "reasonable gamble".
Why? because it's completely made up by propagandists to try to cover their asses.
The calculation is that after realizing they messed up, and people's loved one's dying for preventable reasons will result in a lot of anger, the best plan is to try to point blank tell people "their loved ones will perish" so that later they can say: "we told you, difficult thing this governing, too complex to explain to you lot, but we did tell you this would happen; but you didn't listen! should have washed your hands if you wanted to save your grandmama's!"
...Says some who doesnt even do a basic Google search before posting ignorance like this.
I did a Google search for "coronavirus vs other outbreaks" (which isn't a search for "herd immunity" specifically), and the very first link mentioned heard immunity:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-deadly-is-the-coronavirus-compared-to-past-outbreaks
The fact is that previous flu pandemics have had higher death rates more more deaths than coronavirus, yet the media (and others) has fanned the flames, causing hysteria within the ignorant portion of the population.
It seems like most people see life through a political prism, which is a shame. It's why we have threads like this pointing fingers at each other rather than China - where all this shit comes from. No one questions a communist/socialist govt that has a fetish for population control and where the older population places a big burden on a socialist healthcare system and are therefore expendable.
More deaths at a comparable time in those respective outbreaks? Or are you comparing final deaths of previous flu pandemics with early stage of this pandemic?
If that's the case, google can't help you.
The reality is:
https://nypost.com/2020/03/12/heres-why-the-coronavirus-death-rate-is-so-high-in-italy/
Did you read the link you posted?
Or did you just assume it supported your conclusion that
Quoting Harry Hindu
Which the link doesn't support.
To make the claim that those pandemics have "more deaths than coronavirus" you need to know how many total deaths there will be. We do not know at this stage.
Sars-1 and Ebola are much worse in terms of death rates, sure, but those pandemics were contained by an effective containment strategy -- what I argued when I joined this discussion was a good idea and a policy failure to not pursue containment when it was still feasible, at least for many regions.
The only comparable case on the list is the Spanish flue, which killed 50 million people, maybe more, and was highly disruptive. Also, because there wasn't international air traffic in 1918, that pandemic spread much slower, from region to region, and didn't affect everyone simultaneously. This pandemic is better than the Spanish flue in that it doesn't affect children, but maybe much worse in the second order systematic affects because it is happening simultaneously globally due to not stopping air travel when it would have had a chance to feasibly contain, and even if containment ultimately failed then the pandemic would have spread asynchronously with much more time to prepare, understand, as well as "most" of the global economy functioning as normal at any given time.
So what's your link supposed to establish? Obviously not the total deaths of Coronavirus that you claim will be less than those, as you have no clue what total deaths will be and your precious link does not provide this fact -- as it's in the future and facts are about the past.
So what does it support? That eventually we'll get herd immunity; that's not in discussion here -- although we do not yet know if immunity is long term for this virus, people could get it again which was another reason for containment. Or do you just want to say "pandemics happen"; agreed, yes they do happen.
Yes, "herd immunity" will happen one way or another, but the UK's position that "getting herd immunity quickly" is a strategy, is not a strategy; it's a propaganda play to portray their incompetence as some sort of plan all along.
In a few days they'll do like everyone else and lock down, and they'll say "well, our gamble didn't work, but it was a jolly good try".
The article links to has a little "fact check" checkmark; all the authority anyone needs of course.
Yet states:
[quote=Healthline;https://www.healthline.com/health-news/how-deadly-is-the-coronavirus-compared-to-past-outbreaks#Novel-coronavirus-(COVID-19)]
And some early reports say COVID-19 may have a higher death rate than the seasonal flu. But we may soon find out it’s less deadly than initial reports since so many people with COVID-19 have mild symptoms or are asymptomatic and therefore don’t see a doctor and are largely unaccounted for.[/quote]
Take notice that the two sentences aren't logically connected.
Yes, it has been reported that it's more contagious and has a higher death rate than the seasonable flu.
Yes, the reported death rates maybe lower when we have more information on total deaths to total true infections.
No! The second sentence does not actually state the coronavirus could end up being less deadly than the seasonable flu! No expert says so. All information and all credible models show way higher death rates than the seasonable flu.
The danger of the coronavirus pandemic is not individual chance of death, as this article attempts to portray to try to calm people down, but the systemic effects of overwhelming health systems and governments forced to act to lower the infection rate to something manageable.
Overwhelming the health system not only radically increases the death rate as people die due to lack of treatment, but also causes deaths of other conditions and injuries due to lack of care available, and also causes long term damage to health system -- killing some doctors and nurses, weakening others long-term even if recovered, creating a backlog of everything that can be postponed even if very suboptimal for health outcomes to postpone those scheduled appointments and treatments.
There are also short term systemic affects that go beyond the health system. Criminals may take advantage of the situation to go on a crime spree. People that do not accept triage decisions may lose it. Vulnerable populations that cannot deal with the disruption may riot.
Then there are the longer term economic consequences. Bailing out everyone at the same time to try to reboot the system may cause hyperinflation in a combination of eroded trust in institutions and a new economic situation that is fundamentally different.
That one is funny. Guys lets stop pointing fingers please, lets all point them to China. Let's castigate the Spanish for the Spanish flu and the Mexicans for the Mexican ones, lets point to the gays for aids and the Napolitans for the ubiquitous pizza hut.
I'm selling leaves in a ziplock bag for $10.
If you don't have a response and capitulate on the above issues, then let's move on to others.
I have a question for you.
Given that bailouts are a collectivist socialist scheme, both to individuals and businesses, and given that "Covid-19 isn’t the first threatening disease that’s surged around the world — nor will it be the last." as the article you linked concludes, would you agree that it would be more efficient to let any individual and any business that can't deal with the pandemic fail? Either bankruptcy or homelessness, both in terms of paying for treatment, if not insured or underinsured, or then dealing with the economic downturn.
Given that pandemics are a given, isn't it the responsibility of each individual and business to prepare for what is certain? Clearly only a fool wouldn't. Why should businesses and individuals that are healthy financially and can weather this storm, subsidize those that can't? Wouldn't you agree those that can absorb the shock without government assistance should get a recompense for their wisdom of being able to pounce on more market share or then increase their individual competitiveness in the job market?
I get it, Trump doesn’t speak well. He fumbles his words, contradicts himself, exaggerates and uses “salesman rhetoric”.
Is speaking well and using the right combinations of words in the correct order leadership to you? Because any actor, any lawyer, any speech writer, any talking head can do that.
Talkers are a dime a dozen. Meanwhile, Trump was quarantining foreign nationals, barring Chinese entry into the country, evacuating Americans from Wuhan, and started developing vaccines back in January while he was in the midst of a fake impeachment scandal—back when Italy, with it’s eloquent law-professor of a PM, had its first 2 coronavirus cases. Around the same time, Germany, France, and Spain had their first few cases, all led by people who can speak with eloquence and gravitas. And now Europe is the epicenter of the Coronavirus.
Just to be clear, I do not think their leadership led to the spread of the virus in their countries—it’s no one’s fault—but look what their political niceties and placating lullabies got them. Nothing.
We can debate the “implications” of Ziemer leaving until the cows come home. I’m well aware that a “critical thinker” would imagine a bureaucrat leaving out of some sense of a higher calling, quitting because of Trump’s mismanagement. All bureaucrats have a sense of duty and principle. Isn’t it that so? But often the story isn’t as romantic as we make it out to be.
At the time, critical thinkers read their Twitter tea-leaves and suggested Ziemer’s departure would lead to a reduction in global health security, especially with the Ebola virus picking up steam in Africa around the exact same time. Unfortunately for the nay-sayers the United States stepped up to the plate on that one; and guess who was involved in the administrations efforts there? Ziemer, in his brand spanking new position with USAID, and working with the same NSC officials he was with before. All that funding that was supposed to fall into Trump’s corrupt hands went to combat an Ebola crisis in Africa, much to your chagrin I imagine.
While Trump was being falsely impeached he was reacting swiftly to the coronavirus, back in January, before Italy, France and Germany’s cases reached past 5. This is public knowledge. So the schadenfreude isn’t necessary because your prediction has already been proven false.
But you’re right. This pandemic will be a good test to the various systems in place designed to protect citizens. I think you should be thankful to find yourself in a Nordic country.
According to the WHO the Chinese efforts were particularly effective, but another human toll arises in such strict conditions.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/12/human-toll-chinas-coronavirus-control-efforts
When I described the political reaction to Johnson's strategy, I was not supporting it, only describing it. In my opinion the team managing the government's response is developing this strategy, they do have some strategic thinking going on, but they are lazy and naive about the magnitude of the crisis. As usual with a Conservative government, they are naive and live in an ivory tower. Their raison d' etre is to keep the privelidged classes in power and generate enough wealth to support their privileges. But the current government is the Vote Leave campaign, they are ideological fundamentalists and their doctrine is to leave the EU and become a Singapore on Thames. In this they have left behind the moderates in their party and are recklessly pushing forward the implementation of their ideology.
This being the case, what is most likely to be going on is that they are in a chaotic mess, with a fundamentalist driving forward their agenda come what may, which will include the calculation that the economy must be protected, or all is lost. That a lot of old and poorly people will die, which will actually bail them out of the healthcare and care home crisis. They will now have to formulate someone, or some process to blame. For this because the public would not tolerate such ruthless plans in government. All they need to do is say that the UK situation is different and the virus was to blame for the million or so deaths. And any flack that comes their way will be blamed on the expert advisors and the previous Labour government of 1997-2010, for bankrupting the country(not true by the way). It doesn't matter how bad it gets, they will still get Brexit done.
Did you know that Trump also makes decisions that affect how events actually unfold? And that when he sells decisions using fumbles, contradictions, exaggerations that are bad decisions, the consequences that follow might also actually be really bad?
Quoting NOS4A2
No, it's making good decisions for the collective good that is good leadership of an entire society. Boris Johnson does "good speak" but has also made poor decisions that I have been criticizing.
Trumps incoherent speech, on this occasion, represents incoherent policy decisions.
Quoting NOS4A2
Yes, Europe's response as a whole I've been criticizing as well. I have been mostly referencing "Western leaders", UK, US and all of Europe.
However, Europe has, ultimately, less to fear from this pandemic because socialist institutions are in place to more easily deal with it. The reason why the US previously put a lot of investment into pandemic prevention -- the program that was cut 80 percent that the Fortune article talks about -- was not out of the goodness of America's heart but because previous administrations understood that a pandemic going out of control in the US would be a catastrophe. I'm not going to explain why the US system is particularly vulnerable to this sort of event, you'll get to see first hand! so best talk about it after.
Quoting NOS4A2
Yes, this is the lie the right wing propagandists want desperately for you and others to believe. Ahhh, phooey, pandemic, but it's no one's fault guys; decisions couldn't have been better, they were the best, if anything it's Obama's fault.
It's for sure people's fault. Had a containment strategy been effectively implemented, the same strategy that worked for Sars-1 and Ebola, the pandemic, in the least, would have been significantly slowed. Instead, journalists could fy right from endemic epicenters right through international airports without any testing, questions or quarantine measures. This policy has ensured that the outbreak is everywhere in Europe and US simultaneously. The debacle of the testing in the US means that social distancing, i.e. lockdown, in combination with downplaying the threat of the virus, means that the virus was able to go through many more doubling times than had social distancing been put into place early. A single doubling time means double the problem is "in the pipe" when the system gets overwhelmed, two doubling times means 4 times the problem etc. and the virus can double in normal social circumstance in 3 days, sometimes it seems less if a few super spreaders in key points.
Had the pandemic been slowed as to not overwhelm healthcare systems or, failing that, at least not overload all the major health systems simultaneously representing most of the global economy, yes there would be inconveniences to travelers and some stocks taking a little dip, but 90 percent of the global economy would be working as normal at any given time. Slowing things down buys time to understand the virus and effective measures better, even develop new measures, produce and stockpile critical equipment, optimizing resources for when the virus does hit.
Quoting NOS4A2
So, your response to my comment wasn't supportable, so now you think "debating until the cows come home" is a good place to move the goalposts.
Rear Admiral Ziemer quitting is just one data point we have. Another data point was his program was defunded and his team disbanded. What was the purpose of that team? To prevent a pandemic. What's happening now? A pandemic. If you want to live in a conceptual world where those things are completely unrelated, and even if they are related, no reason it's due to a corrupt and incompetent management of those institutions. Since previous administrations, as I mention above, weren't so corrupt as to not see it's in the self interest of even the most lugubrious plutocrat to prevent a pandemic, most likely they didn't put "just some bureaucrat" in charge of the program, but someone actually competent, actually called by some higher purpose to prevent needless deaths due to a pandemic. It was in Trump's self interest to try to keep someone who had a track record of success with previous pandemics on the team, or, if Ziemer quit to go fishing or something, then make sure there is a proper handoff to someone up for the task, and failing that, cause those fish won't catch themselves you know, then keep that team together to lose the minimum in organizational competence. Trump didn't see it was in his self interest because he's that stupid, and now he's paying the price for wanton firing of those selfish bureaucrats that are certainly not moved by a higher calling for the public good.
Yes, I had understood you weren't supporting the decision. I could have made it more clear that my position is simply they are "more incompetent" than your position.
My point was the framing of your original comment as a "strategic choice".
However, we are pretty close. I am sure the exact details of how decisions were made will come out in various investigations, "telling the inside story" and so on, once the crisis is ended. Health professionals know starting such disputes now won't help the situation, but, to me at least, it's transparently clear the "learning curve" of out leaders was far behind the growth curve of the virus and now they are trying to pretend they had actually listened before but made a strategy.
But we seem to be in agreement on the essential aspects.
What I have been trying to make clear is that this situation is a rare instance where what "they think is economically good", however they define that, spectacularly backfired. Obviously whatever economic pain they were contemplating 2 months ago as "too painful" is essentially insignificant to the economic pain now.
That they were "making decisions for the economy" but we're in a phase of capitalism where decisions are so short sighted, the risk of catastrophic events mere months away is ignored. So it's a mix of fanatical ideological devotion to the stock market as well as unmitigated incompetence, and it's difficult to tease those things apart; but is the philosophically interesting thing from my point of view.
Also, dead pensioners don't vote, so the policy is admirably Machiavellian.
Quoting boethius
My analysis is that you cannot call a government incompetent when they have managed to push through an unpopular and damaging policy by winning an election. "competent criminality" is more the mark.
Thanks to the mass hysteria the media is causing, people are unecessarily flooding the healthcare system. When 95% of the tests are negative for corona, which means that they have a different respiratory illness, the stats aren't a necessary cause for people to worry that they have corona at the first sign of a sore throat.
If the govt wants to has to continually prop up industries that fail during a crisis with my taxpayer dollars, then I want some consequences laid on the corporate heads of these industries. The way you change behavior is to make sure there are some negative consequences to the behavior, not rewards. Every bailout should require a restructuring of the corporate environment that needed the bailout.
Yes, it's the ideology spectacularly backfiring that my purpose here is to document in real time.
In December, containment was possible.
In January I agree containment was no longer possible globally, but it would have still been possible to "stagger the peaks" from one region to another, which would have been difficult but way more manageable both in terms of organizing the worlds health resources as well as not disrupting all economies simultaneously.
In February, yes, it's everywhere basically, but the social distancing measures are inevitable and the sooner they are put in place the better the health system will manage. Banning flights is no longer a game changing social distancing measure, but is just one of many.
I can assure you that "too many calls" is not the definition of "overloading the health system".
You'll see what it means in a week or two, and we can continue this discussion then.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Isn't bailing out a reward full stop? Is "restructuring" really a negative consequence to the business?
What about individuals? I also asked about them, isn't any assistance simply a reward?
In both cases, how do you ensure there's a "negative consequence" worse than the reward. If the negative consequences you talk about are't worse than the reward, then why would those consequences change behavior?
If I steal from you 10 dollars, and as a punishment I need to pay a 3 dollar fine, how does that incentivize me not to steal?
How do you make your scheme actually change behavior unless for every dollar of your tax money the government gives away there is actual pain valued in some way more than a dollar.
You seem to be negotiating with your belief system in a way that doesn't pass a cursory surface level criticism. Could be your belief system is wrong. Think about it over the next few weeks.
Yes, the policy literally kills their core base. They may very well have thought is was noble of them to sacrifice a big part of their base like that. But I think they really did believe the right wing down-playing propaganda just long enough that it was too late. I think the "it kills old people, good for the economy" was a sort of "backstop" position of them thinking "hmm, even if I'm wrong, it's not so bad for Queen and country! For the Queen!".
Quoting unenlightened
Completely agree. Criminality is a drop in for ideology as I am using it. That they weren't concerned about so many deaths is criminal, but that they didn't realize the deaths would be so high as to crash the system is the incompetence.
Should we be punishing the workers along with the corporate heads? I think it was quite clear that the negative consequences will be brought upon those making the corporate decisions.
I think your emotions have an major influence on how you read into things.
How so? No one forces an individual to work for a given corporation, they should have picked a winner or then be an intrepid self employed entrepreneur hopping valiantly from gig to gig.
No one forces an individual to not succeed and not build up a "rainy day fund" for things like pandemics, that any reasonable person knows are a guarantee "happened before, will happen again" as you've taught us.
Why should your tax dollars help out these fools that didn't see this coming and prepare accordingly?
Are you talking about my emotions personally, or is this just some general observation that conservatives and liberals just have a different emotional view of the wold, that leads to a different factual view of the world, and both, when a liberal has a point a conservative has no rational answer to, are very valid and understandable in their own way?
Maybe if we "feel" for the worker in your example we might be tempted to do something.
But isn't helping people deal with a pandemic just going to teach the wrong lesson, the lesson to look for the government to solve your problems rather than solving them yourself. If people get bailed out from this pandemic, how will they learn to prepare for the next pandemic?
Seems that, if the market is efficient, we should let the market sort it out, and it is only by allowing those unprepared for this situation to feel the "negative consequences" that they will learn. That by not helping, we are actually helping them to become better by learning from their mistakes or then, at least, removing them or their business from the market place to let more competent entities take their place. Wouldn't you agree that if the market is efficient, it needs to be let to work, regardless of what anyone "feels" about the short term consequences?
Apples and oranges.
You're comparing diseases prior to the advent of genetic engineering with those after, where viruses are created intentionally for scientific research or as a weapon, and possibly to control your population. India has a comparable sized population and geographic location with China, but most of these viruses are coming out of China.
I wouldn't know, I dont see the world through some political ideology. I view human nature scientically, not politically.
So what does the science say?
That by accompanying a benefit with a negative that is less than the benefit, scientifically, this changes behavior to try to avoid that negative?
You've made a claim about changing behavior. Perfectly verifiable and scientifically valid claim. What data or supposed mechanism supports your claim?
My sister just called a few minutes ago that the sub/military base in Groton is closing due to a sailor stationed there tested positive for the virus, which is the first case on this side of the state. I can not find any news reports about it so I can't be 100% that it is true.
..she also mentioned that some stores and restaurants are closing their bathrooms due to too many people stealing the toilet paper in them.
I would say that there is a learning process here: SARS, MERS, Swineflu etc. Now countries are taking a concentrated and drastic measures. If we would be living in 20th Century, this would be like "a nasty flu". That's it. Old people die of flu, that's just a given. It tells something of the times.
The thing is these pandemics and the one we have now could have been equivalent to Spanish Flu or to mid-20th Century pandemics like the Asian flu and Hong Kong flu, but they weren't. And likely the outcome of this one will be far less also. It doesn't mean that this is at all less dangerous.
One thing is if we start to take "seasonal flu" the same way.
The learning process from SARS, MERS, Ebola is that containment avoids this sort of situation. What we learned from Swineflu is that if something really is not "much worse than the normal flu" turns out people then downplay the next thing.
Probably lesson from swine flu is the current pandemic system is inappropriate to apply to a new flu strain, if it can't have the effects we're seeing now. That "pandemic" should mean for people something extremely disruptive, not a technical thing that can include something bad but not terrible. And another rating system is used for the flu, which only reaches the pandemic official classification if it really is an order of magnitude worse than previous flu strains.
Containment was simply never seriously implemented in a globally coordinated manner this time around -- for reasons that have been clearly communicated by our leaders as "needing to balance with economic interests"; as shutting down too much air travel, lowers air line profits, lowering air line stocks and related stocks, which means the economy isn't "doing as great" which in turn means re-election is less certain.
People just flew all over. In SARS the quarantine and contact tracing measures were serious. 40 000 people where quarantined in Toronto. In ebola, strict travel restrictions allowed containment to a single region that then resources from outside could be poured in.
The current situation exemplifies ignoring all the lessons we learned for SARS, MERS and Ebola.
Quoting ssu
Here, I agree with you. If people had the attitude "old people die all the time of pneumonia" then the disease could just burn through the population, a lot of old people die at home, get buried and that's it. some young people die too, and that's unfortunate.
The "problem" in terms of disruption to our lives and the economy, is indeed psychological. People are no longer accustomed to their loved one's dying for preventable reasons in rich countries, and of course only the middle and up classes in the States -- if it was a disease of the poor it wouldn't be a problem there. Of course, this "privilege" is due to global institutions previously working pretty well; now that they've failed to manage this, each government in turn is simply unable to just "let it burn" whether they want to or not, people just don't accept it. It is too great a trauma to see people in the West die of a disease without even getting to see a doctor; therefore, governments are compelled to act. That they all act, like clockwork, too late, reveals that policy is setup to prefer those people just die and be done with it, but capitalism has reduced it's decision foresight capacity to literally month long timescales.
As I mention earlier, if the economy is primarily "that which keeps people alive", it's impossible to argue you need to die to live.
Ohhh you are a it is a Chines complot kind of guy... It is all an attempt at population control. I should have suspected that all along... Well, I have secret information. It happened to be an Indian ploy, in order to blame the Chinese to disrupt their reputation for technology and thought, paving the way to win the race to produce the strongest chess team in the word.
At least actions taken now are dramatic. And China did at first respond badly, that's true.
Quoting boethius
I agree with you. Time's really are changing. Just like 9/11 changed the whole attitude towards terrorism, we might have here a dramatic change on how we handle epidemics. In the 70's security was lax even if in Europe there was a lot of terrorism.
Thank's for the comments.
We are here in Finland living at the start or "take off" stage of the pandemic with 210 cases and going up (equivalent by population size to 12 000 cases in the US) with no fatalities yet. The government is contemplating emergency laws and deciding next Monday if to keep schools and daycare centers open. Likely that happens when they loose track of epidemic (meaning there isn't a clear history and a path from where everybody has gotten the virus). Now at least officially all cases have been visiting China, Northern Italy etc. with no "domestic" cases.
My son's school informed today that they had a case of a corona-virus infected person being for one day (9th this month) at the school. One class plus teachers have been quarantined from next Monday for 9 days. Any students coming from abroad have to take a two week leave before coming to school. And then yesterday, after school my daughter (who is in a different school from his big brother) felt bad and had fever :yikes:. So girl into bed. Now the fever has subsided and she has no cough, no running nose etc. Although the vast majority of diseases that cause fever aren't this ugly virus we are all excited about, one has to take of course precautions, so no school for her on Monday and a consultation with the teacher when to come. And the family isn't going to meet grandfather for a while. But anyway, there's no meetings next week and work is only from home. Guess the family stays at home for a while and enjoys the drama of a pandemic.
Yes, dramatic action is in the end inevitable.
It is very possible China made sure it "was let loose globally" either by reflexive cover-up of inept mandalorians or then by design once it was clearly going to have massive implications in China. Obviously, China is first to fail to contain.
However, the rest of the world failing to implement any serious containment, means now it's exploding in all the major countries simultaneously (that naturally have the most air travel). Serious containment effort would have displaced peaks, which significant benefits.
No major economy wanted to stop the planes, but what they didn't realize is that "do nothing" meant going towards "planes and everything else" not working. It is an incredible failure in policy, and that the consequences were clearly mere months away, for me anyway, shows that the "brain trust" of capitalism now truly thinks only on time scales of one, maybe two, news cycles.
“Socialist institutions” are gulags, breadlines and collective farms. Europe has no such institutions. But then again, stealing liberal innovations and stamping it with the “socialist” label is par for the course.
As for the rest, point taken.
You think so?
When one option for reasons for bad political decisions is ineptness, I know for what option I'll go for.
I'm not so confident. National security decisions do get made by shadowy figures around round tables.
It's pretty well documented that China covered things up as long as possible; we needed a Chinese doctor to warn us (which is risking one's life in China ... and he died, but we're told it's just coincidence).
I haven't gone into the exact timing of events, so don't have an opinion of what's the more plausible cause of the cover up.
However, it's only Trump, among the leaders of great powers, that doesn't care in the slightest about "the Great Game", it's unwise to extend that assumption to the leadership of the other great powers. Having a situation where China is locked down and the rest of the world isn't is a national security disaster for the PRC; setting things back 1, maybe even 2, five year plans. And time is of the essence, since with proper containment strategy, even if the pandemic was simply mismanaged at first and is already inevitable, maybe a simple cure is found between the highest economic damage in China and the rest of the world, so even measures that effectively slow the virus globally would be a threat to national security.
There is no way to prove such a theory at this time, but there is no way to exclude it either.
The whole saying "never attribute to malice what is explainable by incompetence" or however it goes, isn't really informative. Society rarely accepts the defense of "I accidentally pulled the trigger" ... unless it's a police officer, naturally, but even then sometimes society does decide it was malice, and maybe it even was; both explanations are possible, and humans have survived so far by being clever, not by being inept, so that maybe some evidence that a priori malice is a better explanation if there are only those two options available.
Oh boy. Here we go again. What liberal institutions are you talking about?
“Liberal innovations” such as Keynesian economics and the modern welfare state.
The ineptness can be also simply wishful thinking. And many it actually works for the politician. That it's a local epidemic that goes away. That you get of with just a scare. Then harsh measures would look like panic.
You see, there are very many outbreaks of diseases that don't make it, are just local things.
For example, look at the list of List of Ebola outbreaks where there are over 30 minor outbreaks of Ebola or other Filovirida. And as I've given as an example earlier, every now and then there is a case of the bubonic plague in the US.
Anyway, I don't know the story so well. But I guess history writing will tell us later.
Maybe someone had nightmares?
[hide="Reveal"]
You tell me; with the appropriate quotations, and I'll respond. I'm not going to respond to words you are trying to put into my mouth.
My position has not been an ethical one about what ought to be done to save (mostly elderly) people's lives, as opposed to what ought to be done to stabilize the economy. I have said that the human cost of collapsing our economy is incalculable; that neither you nor I know whether closing international travel early would have resulted in a worse or better outcome overall.
I even said early on that collapse of the economy as soon as possible, since that is arguably the only thing which will dramatically reduce fossil fuel use, may well be the best thing for the planet and humanity overall. My objections to your words have been based on their presenting an overly simplistic analysis.
They may have known this, but that it was already to late, they were between a rock and a hard place.
Johnson's economic advisors would have informed him how fragile the UK economy is at the moment and that any wide reaching measures adopted would bring the house of cards tumbling down. So they couldn't do anything that could compromise the economy. Instead they came out with the strategy line of delay and just keep washing your hands all the time. They might have also known that the number of deaths and the chaos in the health care system would crash the economy as well, but again, there was nothing they could do to prevent any of it.
No10 has been helpless right from the start and the sooner we have everyone staying in their homes except for food shopping and essential trips, the more likely we will be able to ride the first wave intact.
I have grave concerns about the US, it looks like the're going to have a rough ride.
Yes, this is right, but I wonder if the economy will be able to sustain itself intact for extended periods where no one is working. It's going to have to be a balancing act between economic considerations and health considerations.
Are you saying that you'd welcome the death of three billion people worldwide as long as you could have your precious environmental fantasies? This is the trouble with leftists. They claim to love humanity but they hate people. And if you don't agree with them they'd just as soon see you dead.
Keynesian economics is a theory not an institution.
4.5k cases, 9 deaths, comes out at .2 percent. The only other country that comes close is south Korea. Is Germany underreporting deaths? Keeping people on life support far longer? Just random chance?
Quoting boethius
Now:
Quoting Bloombers news
It was obviously never a "strategy" of any sort, just a propaganda slight of hand on gullible people to make them look more responsible: "Well, we had a plan, but we're big enough to admit it's not on track and so we're changing our approach".
It might be the sausages and sauerkraut.. Reports from Japan suggest that keeping your mouth moist, sipping water every 10 minutes, washes the virus into the stomach, and keeps it from the lungs. Keep the virus population low until the immune system catches up. So Salty and acid diet might help.
Or that could all be bullshit, but you heard it here first!
I think that the economy will go into a deep recession in the UK immediately, simply due to the lack of trade in travel, events and hospitality and it's knock on effects. I think we could get through this for a couple of months with help from banks, grants and tax holidays. But that is just the tip of the iceberg, it exposes large numbers of people who are a couple of wage checks away from being homeless, or in debt and an equally large group of people who are maxed out on debt, including mortgages. Once house prices start to drop significantly then the problems become entrenched in negative equity etc.
We were going to have a rough ride anyway with Brexit, before Coronavirus came along. It's turning into a perfect storm with Johnson and Cummings at the helm, blind to anything outside the comfort zone of the privelidged classes and wealthy exploiters. Doggedly following an ideological course of cutting all ties with the EU by the end of the year come what may. He is adamant that he won't ask for an extension to the transition period, currently up to 31 Dec' and intends to broker a trade deal with the EU by June. The very fact that he is not accepting the seriousness of the crisis and allowing an extension to negotiations shows that he is not concerned with getting it right, but only holding on to power long enough to get it done what ever the cost.
The ideologically driven Brexiters have risen up and grabbed control of the reigns in the UK and are accelerating the Brexit train towards the abyss at maximum acceleration just to ensure we go over the edge however bad it gets. This is an existential threat for the Conservative party, because if it fails at this point, they are facing a decade or more of a socialist agenda which would strip out the privelidged wealth of the privileged classes and condemn them to electoral oblivion. They will fight tooth and nail to preserve their privelidge and Brexit was an important step in their struggle against a growing desire for a more social democratic direction for the country.
Although as mentions, cultural differences have an effect, Germany is not yet overloaded. They also have higher health care capacity due to more sustained public health care investments.
Deaths start to rise with triage. Someone with almost non-functioning lungs can be kept alive on a respirator for weeks. Someone with completely non-functioning lungs can be kept alive with a ECMO machine (filters and oxygenates the blood outside the body).
With capacity, many people that would otherwise die recover, and even the people that don't ever recover can have their life extended by many weeks.
At capacity there will still be differences between outcomes in different places due to average age, average weight (obesity makes it harder to breath and so much harder for the body to deal with pneumonia), smoking, culture etc., but they won't be large differences (not near an order of magnitude difference we are seeing). However, once capacity is reached and the system is forced into triage, as happened in Wuhan and now Italy and Iran, deaths rapidly increase. Lung failure of course kills immediately without intervention.
Of note, because old people are triaged to save the young, this biases the data towards "old people dying" even more, leading (at first) young people to minimize it even more and spread it around even more. Statistics seems to suggest the "true danger" of the virus is actually more-or-less equally dangerous to all age groups in that catching the virus doubles your chances of death this year; however, if you're plus 80 and have a 10% chance of dying this year, now it's 20% so results in way higher absolute numbers for older age groups (in addition to the triage bias).
Great. Now I am afraid :wink:
Yes, the very large percentage of critical cases (cases that are unlikely to recover without medical intervention), is why abandoning containment as a policy, as I observed when I joined this thread, was so incredibly irresponsible.
Had containment been pursued, and the threat taken seriously, systems would be overwhelmed much slower as well as at different times. This not only "flattens the peak" for each individual health system, making it easier to deal with, but allows other health systems to move resources around to optimize the global community's response (increase capacity where it's needed, take lessons learned from one crisis spot to the next).
The only plausible explanation is that policy makers in the West simply didn't see human life as having any intrinsic value, and by the time the economic consequences were investigated of different approaches (takes a while because economists are not real scientists and they mainly just deal with retro-active predictions and so want to see how things play out elsewhere) it was too late to pursue an optimum strategy both from a public health and economic point of view.
Turns out you really can't serve two masters; you will love the one and hate the other, and your house will be divided in times of crisis.
Especially when there's some news that the lock down is working to curb the growth rate of infections. I guess the "lock down" option will be very trendy now. No huge public outcries because of the actions have been heard in Poland, Denmark, Czech Republic or Spain.
Anyway, this will be a great leap in the digitalization of the whole society! Just think how many workplaces have to learn now to use Skype, Teams, Whatsapp etc.
That's a great list, thank you unenlightened. And really shows how Trump deals with things.
You should add the telling example of how Trump thinks about everything from Feb 28th:
"The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus - One of my people came up to me and said, 'Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.' That did not work out too well. They could not do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. ... They tried anything. ... And this is their new hoax."
Next Trump will start bragging about how his quick and dramatic decisions saved the US from a worse outbreak! That we will surely hear. And the Trumpists will reurgitate that whimsical view even on this forum.
Such a great guy. :confused:
If you think "liberal innovations" are bad.. So are "free-market capitalism". Antinatalism scoffs at both of these as FORCING more people into the world in the first place by having more children. A pox on both your houses. Both liberals and conservatives feel entitled to force their ideologies on yet another generation to live out their demented ideas about ways-of-life.. Oh but great, if the child doesn't like it they can just go kill themselves! What a foolish unsettling system all ideologies are and people who thus create more progeny to have to live out their ideological abstractions. Its all using people for an ideology. Its all ego-stroking thinking YOUR child MUST be created to experience life. All of you can go bugger off with your ideologies and forcing others to live them, honestly.
What about apolitical parents, with no political party affiliation, having children?
Without the younger generation, who is going to pay for your medication and hospital visits when you are old and retired? You end up running into the same problem China is after the implementation of their "one-child" policy.
Solution: Coronavirus.
Now that's a catchy phrase!
That is precisely the thinking that gets us into this position. You would be using the suffering of the next generation (by having them knowing the world contains some suffering) to try to mitigate what is happening currently, thus continuing the cycle. Not a good policy if you want to end the cycle itself. Coronavirus is exactly the kind of thing you would bringing on to a new generation.
I asked my kids if they are suffering because they know there is suffering in the world. They said, "No. There is also happiness in the world that wouldn't be realized if there wasn't some suffering". Smart kids.
That makes no sense actually. Do you pine over the happiness not being realized by the non-existent aliens on Mars?
Make America great again, by stealing German scientists again.
https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/what-we-do/news-stories/news/covid-19-outbreak-crisis-update-march-13?fbclid=IwAR1G4-3OBhuBjIu3WLvVrWBix1Q0uW8l27U8dDyrHEvxnA8YSpU-UwF7QyQ
I’m almost certain that antinatalist rationalization is merely excuse-making for those too scared to have children. Don’t have children, sure, but don’t pretend you’re saving the soul of a child who will never exist anyways.
Yep, there's a long tradition to that!
It’s how they signal their bona fides to one another.
You didn't even directly answer the charge against ideologies, ego-stroking and all of that. And yes, a potential to have a child is one that could exist. This lateral move into trying to question the idea of potential realities from happening, is simply bad philosophy. If outcomes don't happen from previous actions, step in front of a fast moving car and see what happens.. I mean, we can't predict what could happen, right? You are sparing someone from life by not having something that can potentially be had. No, you are saving someone from existing, not saving a particular already existing person. But you know that and now you want to change the argument.. The argument is that progressives and cons want to perpetuate their demented ideologies into yet a new generation.. Again, you're both wrong.
I'll repeat the charges:
If you think "liberal innovations" are bad.. So are "free-market capitalism". Antinatalism scoffs at both of these as FORCING more people into the world in the first place by having more children. A pox on both your houses. Both liberals and conservatives feel entitled to force their ideologies on yet another generation to live out their demented ideas about ways-of-life.. Oh but great, if the child doesn't like it they can just go kill themselves! What a foolish unsettling system all ideologies are and people who thus create more progeny to have to live out their ideological abstractions. Its all using people for an ideology. Its all ego-stroking thinking YOUR child MUST be created to experience life. All of you can go bugger off with your ideologies and forcing others to live them, honestly.
Jack Nicas
The New York Times
Mar 2020
Sorry for being dismissive but it is somewhat off-topic. But No, you’re not sparing anyone because there is no one to spare. You’re speaking about protecting figments of your imagination and pretending you’re being good for doing so. That’s demented.
You are questioning that people can make decisions that have future outcomes? And you are questioning that by preventing something now, you can prevent a future outcome? Please. This is Sophistic bullshit. And you still sidestepped the actual topic at hand that cons and libs just want to procreate their ideologies on behalf of other people, for them.
No, I’m questioning the absurdity that you have in mind some person that you’re protecting. No need to twist what I say, especially while accusing someone of sophistry. There are plenty of reasons to not have children that need not involve some fake ethical principle.
It goes without saying that people tend to pass their ideologies to their children. So what? The topic is coronavirus.
Yes plenty of reason, that go into the principle. I did not say I had someone in mind that I was protecting. You ignored what I said and made your own (what a sophist does): Quoting schopenhauer1
Quoting NOS4A2
Yes indeed, but you seemed to be off topic too ranting about your anti-liberal/ pro whatever brand of conservatism. I'm leaving this conversation now.. but if you want to discuss how your sophistry is bullshit, we can continue on my ideology thread.. I'll leave it to you.. Whatever troll thing you answer to this, I will not respond on this thread.
“ you are saving someone from existing”. No, you are not saving anyone from anything. It’s a lie. You have saved exactly zero people. Your imaginary “someone” is a no one. It’s nothing.
Good.
The notion that liberals are closeted socialists is another sticky idea, apparently.
The US is at 41. That's 41/50ths a person per state we've lost. Do you know what it's like to lose just over 80% of a person? It's not pretty I tell you.
Let me introduce you to a little concept called "exponential growth", or if you insist on technical mathematical speak, the acceleration phase of a logistics curve of total cases, active and resolved.
Since you're about to get a live demonstration, just circle back if you have any questions once we pass the inflection point and things start to calm down.
You're at least a month behind peak. Italy's infection total was doubling daily for a while (not sure of today's figures). Anyway, take 1 and double it thirty times (sorry, I mean get someone who knows math to do it for you) and all the toilet paper in the world won't save you.
*Cross posted.
You're at about Feb 15th Italian time.
This would be the case if there wasn't a quick corporate gift to make a quick buck producing some easy-smeazy test kits. That socialist institution the WHO did it! How hard could it possibly be.
US could be as little as 8 days behind Italy, but actually worse than that because, again without testing, measures are lagging behind and additionally, with the president downplaying, lot's of republicans and other fools felt the need to virtue signal that they didn't fear this "just the flu" by participating in activities and gestures that actually increase the chance of spreading the disease, as well as everyone scrumpling together to panic buy as the free market gracefully responds efficiently to the situation, and to make matters even worse, without sick leave, many just have to work even if they know they're sick. Therefore, more doubling times will be locked in before there is a lock down, resulting in significantly, significantly more problems.
Thanks to testing, Italy did put in place regional travel restrictions and quarantine pretty quick, that those measures weren't good enough to significantly slow the virus should absolutely terrify anyone in the US a saturation is reached without even the benefit of those inadequate measures.
I was talking about deaths, not every Corona induced sneeze. 6455/worldwide population is the current number.
We're also talking about deaths, but also those in the future which, with foresight, is possible for people to do something about now.
If you want to only talk about current deaths and a hypothetical world where only those matter, you should say so, so that we can dismiss such a topic as irrelevant and not waste our time.
Brilliant! I missed that one.
See where this is going?
Good things socialist; bad things corporate! Typical socialists, stealing and living off the innovations of others.
Went down a treat, thanks. I'll stop teasing Grump as soon as he gets out of my newsfeed. Boris, unfortunately is so blatantly "2or3 million dead pensioners is a price well worth paying", he is beyond even my dark humour.
Actually no, and neither do you, as there's no way to extrapolate based on that graph, unless you're suggesting that y is approaching infinity based upon a current death count of 40.
If the y axis were marked in units of 1 million, the death toll would be imperceptible without a microscope on that graph and you'd be making toilet paper jokes like me.
OK, stupidly I'm just presuming Alex Jones's anti-coronavirus toothpaste doesn't really work and the spread in the U.S. will be similar to other countries who failed to take the virus seriously enough when they had time.
Except now the awareness and the precautions of the virus are totally on a different planet than a month ago. This should be taken into account. With schools closing down, all public events canceled, with a national emergency and a lot of countries in total lock down mode, that will likely result that it won't be like in Italy from Feb 15th onward. Now it starts to be so that you simply cannot be without have heard of the virus.
Granted, the number of cases has increased as a result of increased surveillance testing -- which is the whole point of surveillance testing, to detect otherwise invisible transmission.
Hanover may be dismissive because the numbers are quite small in most US states, BUT all epidemics and pandemics start out with small numbers. The 1918 influenza epidemic didn't begin with 100,000 cases; it began with a very small number. Same for Covid-19 in Huwei, same for SARS, same for MERS, same for Ebola, same for... most readily communicable diseases.
Hanover is overlooking an important point: US (and many developed countries') hospitals do not have lots of reserved empty beds and critical care equipment, like respirators, nor reserves of doctors, skilled nurses and allied professions. 50 critical care cases might well swamp a metropolitan areas critical care resources, because most of those ICU beds are already in use. Why don't they have more resources? Because they can no longer afford to maintain these reserves. Consolidation, closure of obsolete hospitals (too old to rehabilitate) closure of small financially precarious hospitals, etc. left us with fewer, but financially stable, hospitals operating at close to full capacity. THEREFORE
it is essential to do what we can do to "flatten the curve" of new cases. That's what social distancing (something I've been doing for a decade, at least), voluntary self-storage, and so on is for: keeping as many people as possible out of harms way.
I hope I'm wrong, I have relatives there, but I expect Trumpmerica is more likely to walk itself blindly into a disaster than do what's necessary, which is a total and extreme shutdown.
Did you know the reason a lot of leftists have long hair is to cover up the little horns growing from the sides of their skull? Or maybe I'm just speaking for myself as I break out the popcorn and watch in hopeful glee as the covid death toll mounts.
I've never seen so much fear and anxiety. Aspirin kills more people a day than this ever will.
What the fuck is this, the Spanish plague?
I think that's your Irish Catholic third cousin about to be the POTUS.
Notice how when I say to all these comments "you'll understand in a week or two" none of my astute interlocutors ever comes back with reasons the situation should be expected to be any different than is described currently right now in Italy? But please, try to succeed where others have failed.
I don't know what your position is. Anyway, thinking nowadays is becoming so hard to do that I just lay in bed and relax and hope I go to heaven with my small piece of sanity.
Thanks for joining and promptly existing the discussion. Your contribution has been noted and catalogued. I will ask you later if you still think your island is the sane one, once consequences enter your personal sphere it should be easier to judge; hands on learning and all that.
I think most of this is self-inflicted. I observed the plunge in the stock market, and it prompted me towards the conclusion that people are rather not worth dealing with.
Beam me up Scotty!
Why did't you deal with those people in the stock market by placing put options or betting on the winners in this sort of situation, like netflix?
Shouldn't you just learn to make better deals next time? Why conclude you shouldn't deal with people at all in a free market exchange framework? Seems rash.
... Also, why would Scotty be motivated to beam you up in a moneyless society dedicated to the betterment of mankind? Implausible fantasy if you ask me.
What would you call a disaster? The only truly deadly pandemic has been HIV/AIDS with 32 million people dead.
Let's just look at deaths from prior pandemics in the US. Naturally the death tolls vary quite much, but still I guess they can give some information:
Pandemic.................number of deaths in the US
1957-58 Asian flu: 69 800
1968-1969 Hong Kong flu: 34 000 - 100 000
2009 H1N1 "swineflu": 12 000
Now, do you remember 2009? Did swineflu get similar precautions as today? I don't think so.
My argument is that people now will think that if 10 000 people die of corona-virus in the US, that will be a disaster.
22,000 people in the US have died of the flu THIS YEAR already. HIV? How about heart disease which kills nearly 20 million a year. Cancer, around 10 million. Malaria, 1 million. Corvid ... at worst it may, just possibly, nearly compete with cancer this year. If I’m being honest I think it’s more realistic to view it as maybe competing with malaria.
The real issue is what will happen when the next strain comes around. That could be terrible - they’ve been warning about this for years already.
There is little doubt in my mind that Coronovirus is being exploited mercilessly as a profit generating idea, based on fear, anxiety, and paranoia.
You invest in your stock options as much as you want.
I'm tired of this world.
No, the stats are only a good point if there was some reason to believe deaths and injury from Corrona would of similar magnitude as previous pandemics.
But this whole logic that "the liberals are inventing" is just ridiculous. If Trump was in charge, and the facts didn't warrant "banning flight with Europe for 30 days" and declaring a state of emergency, why would Trump do it then? To please the left? It makes no sense.
Certainly if it was really a hoax or overhyped by keeping a cool head Trump would prove his superior genius and all the other attributes he attributes to himself. Why go along with a ruse if you know it's a ruse and you're the president of the united states?
He even becomes self aware that the logic makes no sense when he has to add "diminished power" before explaining it's all whipped up by liberals.
Based on current case fatality rates under triage conditions, global deaths could be as high as 100 million. If 70 percent of the world gets it and there's 1 non-diagnosed mild case for every "case" and the case fatality is 5 percent, then that's roughly 120 million people. An order of magnitude more deaths than cancer and many additional risks that we simply don't know yet: long term injury, reinfection, complications, more dangerous mutations, etc. Maybe we get lucky ... maybe we don't.
It's these basic numbers that is causing these completely unprecedented responses from governments.
Even if that were so, isn't that just good marketing?
Lot's of ideas make money by taking advantage of psychological weaknesses in people. Can Windows and Mac compete with my Debian Linux, I don't see any rational basis for it, but I don't see why I shouldn't wish Microsoft and Apple success in exploiting psychological weakness in people to make them desire their products, that then make it easier for me to compete in the market place with my numerical analysis service taking advantage of software people were foolish enough to give away for free! talk about an ocean of insanity over there. Indeed, I wish Microsoft and Apple all the best. Why, if you've lost money failing to predict these events, I feel nothing for you, but I divert my energies to taking the market share from anyone who made a similar mistake.
If C is the conclusion of A leading to B, and if A and C are intrinsically motivated by the desire to make money out of psychological weakness found in B, then what?
Smells like victory to me.
This changes your point, which was that graph told me something. Now you're telling me I can extrapolate from other data from other countries. Maybe yes, maybe no. The Italian population is older than the US.
Yeah, and whoever buys into the idea is then what, again?
I'm not buying in your scenario, I'm selling.
And I'm raking it in.
Good for you, then. Money never motivated me so go figure.
Then why does a stock market move lead you to change your dealings with people in the first place?
What I said makes no sense to you and what you said makes no sense to me. Are we speaking different languages, or what's the problem?
I don't understand. What do you mean?
You mean like how the religious signal their bona fides to each other? I'd agree. Their hatred has reached a religious fervor. It's sad to have your mind dominated by the acts of Trump (Satan or the Anti-christ in their mind), because of the bubble they allow themselves to be put in.
No.
I said socialist-in-liberal-clothes', as in a wolf-in-sheep-clothes, as in knowing you're a socialist, but trying top pass yourself off as a libertarian (the only true liberal), in order for you ideas to sound more reasonable to others.
I took as example equivalent pandemics. When they find out that heart disease is caused by an infection, that will be the day.
Quoting I like sushi
Exactly.
Yet any disease that can be treated or avoided with government action is given a focus. That's the whole point. You see, people take an Earthquake is taken as a given. Only construction regulation, first response and medical treatment effect how many die. Yet it's totally different if the same amount of people would die in a terrorist attack or war. Those we can prevent.
If by closing the border you can spare X amount of people from dying, will you close the border and face an economic downturn. Which government will choose then to keep the border open? Where do you draw the line? If you keep borders open and there isn't a recession and If 10 more are killed? Would that be Ok? What about 100 more deaths? 1 000? 10 000? 100 000?
The thing is, you cannot argue with counter-factuals of "What if nothing would be done, then how many would die". It doesn't go like that. Hence once a pandemic is over a level of reporting, then governments will act. So this might be the new normal if and when there are pandemics, even less dangerous ones.
Sound like we'll have more opportunities to buy Apple and Microsoft stocks at discount prices. Nice! Sounds like a good reason for the media to fan the flames of some crisis.
From the companies themselves nonetheless.
https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm
Also cancer deaths are about the same level, in the US.
Unless you are referring to global figures, but you and ssu appear to be discussing US figures.
With Coronavirus we are being told that every country is likely to loose a few millions of citizens in the next few months due to something theoretically avoidable. That is the difference and it is unclear what degree of action will cause a significant reduction in these figures. No one knows how this will end, or if an effective vaccine will be found. Hopefully it won't be to bad and we will pull through with our civilisation unscathed. And we take this as a wake up call for what you suggest next.
I think I'll invest in Charmin and Cottonelle while I'm at it. The socialists are going to be so stressed out over the next 5 years, they'll have constant bouts of diarrhea thanks to Trump, the anti-christ.
P&G
Obviously you can argue with the counter factual of "What if nothing would be done, then how many would die" by having some basis to estimate the deaths will be low if action isn't taken.
Your whole previous point of drawing a comparison to previous pandemics that didn't have these extreme policy reactions is proof that you can go forward without the measures we're seeing today ... if the deaths really are low enough that "the economic disease" of extreme measures would be worse than "the actual disease" then yes, it's unfortunate it will kill people but it's impossible to shut down society to just delay the inevitable spread of the disease.
In those previous cases where the world reaction wasn't so intense, health systems weren't completely overloaded. That's the difference with this disease, and it's not based on "aha, you can't argue with the counter-factual! now bow to the liberal hysteria!" it's based on the experience that unfolded in Wuhan, Italy, South Korea. The disease explodes in number of cases and is overwhelming until measures are taken to reduce rate of transmission.
If numbers of deaths aren't crazy high, it's because measures were taken. This simple fact should be very obvious by now. If more people aren't already dead in Italy, it's because they've been progressively making more and more intense measures until the infection rate goes below the threshold of what's manageable. That it has not been achieved yet should be extremely worrying of just how dangerous this disease is to enough people that it quickly overwhelms the health system (3 weeks from "we have an outbreak" to shutting down the entire country).
Now, yes, you could just let everyone who can't survive without treatment die and everyone else carry on as normal. The fact is, people don't accept that policy. So, you can argue for a change in values and subsequent change in policy, but the facts simply happen to be this disease is way more deadly than the flu, both seasonal and previous flu pandemics up until the Spanish flu (and the Spanish flu was very disruptive to society and economies; some places avoided the disease for quite some time through extreme measures like quarantines and travel restrictions like we're seeing today; the reason we remember the Spanish flue of 1918 is precisely because it was so disruptive; without treatment Corona virus could easily kill 10% of cases, that's a deadliness on par or higher than the Spanish flu. The difference today is that we have way better treatment for pneumonia and so societies want to save people that can be saved, which requires lowering the infection rate to a level where doctors can treat everyone).
I think that a true libertarian’s ideas might sound more reasonable if they pretended to be a conservative or liberal. Anyway, a ‘socialist’ could stand for a wide range of things. An American liberal is much more specific.
If money isn't your motivation, why would observations of the stock market have any affect on you?
Yeah, as if the economy weren't relevant towards prosperity and personal leisure.
Anyway, I'm done, as this is getting funny.
If no action would be taken to fight the disease, there would have already been a lot of pandemics in our lifetime causing similar havoc as the black death or the Spanish flu. In the case of the Spanish flu antibiotics have gone a long way from 1918. After all, let's not forget that the modern influenza A has derived from it.
Quoting boethius
And this is my point: we simply don't tolerate the idea of many thousands dying in an epidemic as we earlier did.
The lessons learned have improved our responses in fighting epidemics. That itself has changed how countries respond to outbreaks. Politicians, even if they wouldn't care so much (as Trump at first), simply have to react. That now a multitude of European countries are shutting down their borders and my country is serious contemplating emergency laws that have never been implemented since WW2 tells the playing field for politicians has changed.
For example, assume if we could forecast earthquakes in a similar way we can forecast volcano eruptions. That would totally change everything. US politicians simply couldn't disregard alarm bells from the scientific community of an impeding strong earth quake in the San Andreas fault let's say in the next two weeks. How many fatalities would we accept if we had prior knowledge of an earthquake that would be estimated to be 7 to 9 on the richter scale?
Quoting ssu
Both these statements assume you can make a comparison between "action" and "no action" by estimating the likely outcome of each course of action.
However, I disagree that "we tolerated the idea of many thousands dying in an epidemic as we earlier did". We didn't "tolerate the idea" of, for instance, the Spanish flu; it wasn't just accepted as "that's life", lot's of actions were done from trying to cover it up where it emerged so as not to invite a German attack at a time of weakness, to wide spread fear and disruptions, and a large effort to treat people as best as could be done.
The whole idea of policy measured to reduce rate of infection to something doctors could deal with was discovered in the Spanish flu and from which the classic comparative cases are drawn as the empirical basis for the policy.
The phenomena is very similar to what we are seeing today for a pandemic of comparable mortality.
The case fatality rate was 2.5% for Spanish flu, "not so much", "nothing close to the black death" and yet society remembers this event.
Our coronavirus pandemic today could easily be worse, as we've spread the disease around the globe even more quickly and efficiently and despite our science improvements we have places with a official case fatality rate of between 3 and 5 %, and we do not know what the future holds. It was a second mutated strain making a second wave in the fall that was the most lethal episode of the Spanish flu.
Treatment for critical coronavirus patients is possible, but highly labour and equipment intensive for medical facilities. This is a massive disadvantage compared to Spanish flu.
Making a precise comparison is very tricky (we can for instance count not only deaths but "quality years lost" in which case Spanish flu is weighted much worse; but only so far in this pandemic; if it causes a lot of long term complications the weight may swing back on such a scale), but they are clearly comparable events and the fear is rational now, as it was rational back then. It wasn't just "a tolerated idea" that a disease would come through and kill a bunch of people; people feared such events, and rightly so.
That's true. It started as an "ordinary flu". The second time around was worse.
Well, we live in interesting times.
You think so?
I disagree. Even the libertarian people of the US will adhere to the instructions of the CDC and their local health services.
Yes, so if this is starting already at "really bad" our last experience with sort of major pandemic is we can expect it to get even worse.
It is a truly plausible and quite simply terrifying possibility.
When a person is sick with two bad viruses at the same time, genetic material gets mixed and matched and there is quite high probability of a new viable virus ... that maybe solve the weaknesses of one with the strengths of the other.
This is a quite rare occurrence, but in a pandemic so many people are getting a dangerous pathogen that these recombination events become essentially inevitable. We now have more people on the planet, and thus more absolute numbers for such possibilities to occur (there are other factors at play, but they could easily give us worse odds too, I don't think it's possible to know ... ahead of time).
The governor of California hinted as much in a news conference today.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/15/california-governor-directs-all-bars-nightclubs-wineries-close-coronavirus
Luckily, as of now, the people are compliant. But given sufficient time that might all change.
Although I agree US libertarians will be fully engaged in the collectivist organization, funding and even proud of their own little personal sacrifices for the common good, I actually agree with .
The institutions needed to keep things stable in the US don't exist as they do here in Europe, and there's no way to create them on short notice.
People are going to get really, really angry for many, many reasons.
There's also a massive organized crime problem in the US due to decades of pursuing a policy to create prison labour and disenfranchise African American voters; a very different situation to the Nordic's where organized crime does exist, but is not a rampant one nor is gun violence the norm within the organized crime community. Thanks to investments in education, social security and a rehabilitation based justice system, so all members of society can "see" the social contract working if they look, which avoids fueling a vast criminal underworld of, essentially, outcasts. Crime gets worse, not better, when the system destabilizes.
It could be managed, but it's a tinderbox.
The pandemic likely will take more time than people will think. It may take a year. But I don't think people will revolt, they will more likely adapt to a 'new normal'. Likely people will start using more face masks than before, start using that elbow bump and not tolerate people coughing or sneezing as before. I don't see any reason for people revolting.
(Perhaps when Trump cancels/postpones the elections because of pandemic or something.)
That would not surprise me. Especially given all the 'jokes' he's made about being president for life...
In a national state of emergency...
...nearly anything goes. It is a representative republic after-all... replete with the noble lie.
All the wackos will completely forget that they have a tendency to over-react and they'll do it again for whatever reason. Eventually they'll accidently panic for something panic-worthy.
I'm not sure NOS4A2 is talking about a revolt.
For me, however, it's not that people revolt, Marshal law would be needed in the event of "crazy people" vs the police or just your normal gangs vs the police.
Marshal law may also be needed if (due to inaction in slowing the infection rate until now) it's simply way more out of control than even Italy as a base case.
I think a “new normal” is definitely more likely than a police-state. But there are types of people in the US (militia-types and preppers) who will not take kindly to drastic state actions that might infringe on their rights.
That was already seen when one of the nightmare-disaster scenarios happened with hurricane Katrina with the levies being breached. It can be totally true what Chris Kyle (depicted in American Sniper) bragged about doing in New Orleans.
Yet hardly a pandemic makes these things happen. It doesn't happen with lightning speed. And this is the time we are at peak hype about it. So... toilet paper riots? Has anyone noticed those?
Quoting frank
Yeah, this pandemic will be old news come winter 2020-2021 when the actual spike will happen. And only later will they start putting higher the numbers of deaths that likely will emerge in historical accounts in the 2030's. Then we'll be surprised that so many actually died.
Marshal law isn't a mad max scenario. Most people would just be sitting at home.
But if the administration loses it's grip even more of the situation (they're trying to catchup now, have serious press conferences, take everything "really seriously", listen to the experts and build some sort of collectivist spirit of "all America"), then soldiers in the streets will be needed to fix things.
Marshal law will just symbolize how incompetently the whole thing has been managed.
If the virus stays the same, hospitals will be overwhelmed and lot's of people will die in bad conditions, but the virus will end up going through the population and achieve the "herd immunity" strategy all by itself (no government intervention is needed to achieve this goal).
However, what the situation will be like then socially, economically, politically, is hard to predict for the US.
You are using your European experience as a basis. There are some key differences.
The US does not have paid sick leave, nor quick and easy "keep me alive money" like your infamous Kela (Finnish bureaucrats solve your personal problems on behalf of the government). As soon as people have no money, can't eat, and get violent on, not necessary big scale, just impressive for the news cycle: Marshal law.
The US does not have universal health care, so it's going to be chaos people, government, hospitals, trying to resolve who pays for what. Obviously, the simple solution is for the government to say "ok, we'll pay for all health care" and poor in what money's needed and people just get whatever treatment they need (if they survive the government death panels: i.e. triage), as that's a sensible policy, but the Republicans will have a very difficult time psychologically coming to such a realization, in particular before the chaos begins. As soon as someone attacks a hospital with a gun and succeeds a bit: Marshal law. Such a person may feel cheated of treatment for themselves (for instance, a different chronic disease that can no longer be treated properly), may be aggrieved for lost loved ones that got triaged unjustly in their view, or some other chain of reasoning to violence. Marshal law.
The US does not have free education and rehabilitation based justice system; this fosters a large criminal underclass. These people do crime, it's how they survive. They won't stop because of a pandemic. They see new opportunities and (thanks to poor planning due to a low education quality that is funded to proportional to the value of houses in the neighborhood) get into too many gun battles with the police: Marshal law.
Measures without Marshal law are just not getting the virus under control and the pressure is immense to do so: well, Marshal law.
It's the only institution Trump will have available to deal with any of these problems, and so it is the institution Trump will use.
This is that 5 finger death punch China was on about. Perhaps isolation [I] on home soil[/I] is bad.
Look at it's shape. If
A. It doesn't look man-made.
B. That it can take a finite amount of punches.
You had over nine coronas.
I don't live in the US. I am not in a high risk group, but thanks for your concern. Please share your information in the event it does end up being useful to me or then someone else following this discussion.
I'm not really worried about any worse problems other than dealing with the disease happening where I am. Why? Universal health care, social security, etc.
I feel for people unnecessarily suffering or having loved one's dying in Europe, the US and elsewhere.
But since this is a philosophy forum and my main concern is politics, my analysis is that this situation is particularly unstable in the US given the political system. This instability can lead to adjacent negative outcomes in the US, but also have geopolitical consequences; worthwhile to discuss.
That such events are now a serious possibility to consider, is exactly why you don't abandon containment in favour of keeping the stock market from going down a bit (my original purpose to argue when I started in this discussion, as I realized containment was dropped as a strategy).
Now that the window for containment is passed, the window to deny it will explode in the US and elsewhere in Europe has passed, we may as well move onto the likely political outcomes.
Actually, I think they will be disappointed. They assume the Hollywood scenario. It's not going to happen.
Think about it.
In our lifetime we've already seen an equivalent crash and crisis to the 1929 crash. The international financial system was already on the brink of collapsing (that we were informed about later). Now we are seeing a pandemic where countries are going on lock down and closing borders.
This is what the preppers have been waiting for. And they can stay in their home as they have planned. And normal people will stay home also. And the real fuss is about ....toilet paper.
More of an anti-climax than a climax to say "I told you so" for the preppers.
Quoting boethius
The paid sick leave option is a good point. But then who will say that people cannot go to work?
Quoting boethius
But we do already have the hysteria up a notch from you already. We still are in the "containment" phase and not in the "mitigation" phase like Sweden. Of course, we will be there soon.
And the result has been simply:
1) Officials have urged people to stay home if you have ordinary flu symptoms. Only if you have breathing problems, then go to the hospital .
2) They are now only to test risk groups: elderly or those who have been in China, Italy etc. They simply don't have the capacity to check EVERY person that has a cough. If you are with ordinary flu symptoms and not been in China, then simply stay home.
I will assume that the US response will be something similar. With the exception that it's the rich that will get tested for corona-virus. So it's not surprising for me that it's Tom Hanks and wife that are the new models for corona victims.
I forgot to elaborate. No paid sick leave means people that really are too sick to work won't get paid. But more importantly, lot's of precarious jobs in the US that may simply disappear all together and it may simply be impossible to even attempt to keep such business and giggers afloat as you don't know who they are as it's not a regular business (without some sort of universal basic income scheme).
Quoting ssu
It won't be similar. European countries have learned from the Italy case, and it is more or less known at which stage each European country is. Tests have been available, especially for people dying of covid19 symptoms.
The danger in the US is that due to delay of testing (even of people dead of Covid19 symptoms) it's gone through more doubling times than anywhere in Europe. Doubling times are as short as 2-3 days, seemingly as short as a day in some conditions (such as people actively trying to spread the virus to stick it to the libs). So a week delay on appropriate response can be really a significant difference on how events then unfold.
Dealing with a twice as big problem is obviously much worse, and if you get to 4,8,16 times bigger scale problem by delaying 10-15 days (4 doubling times), it's really a totally different situation.
The current assumption is the US will be as bad as Italy, but due to lack of testing and thus real data informed strategy it could be much worse.
The problem with these sorts of growth rates is that it's really, really difficult to catch up from behind the problem. Italy delayed more than Wuhan in extreme measures ... new cases haven't leveled off as we speak in Italy and are higher than Wuhan's maximum reported number; so, imagine delaying more than Italy.
Cool. So your healthcare team will go to extremes to keep you alive. That's not the case with most of those threatened with death by post-viral pneumonia. But let's say you get really sick with this virus for a couple of weeks and it goes into pneumonia. One night you find that you can hardly breathe, so you call an ambulance. They find you hypoxic and intubate you on the ride into the hospital. They struggle with you for a couple of days in the ICU and then decide to put you on ECMO (lung bypass). This goes on for a week or so and you finally start getting better. You come off ECMO and start the hard road to recovery.
You survived 1) because you started out young and healthy, and 2) because of medical technology, the vast majority of which was originally developed in the USA (sorry, it just was.)
Your nextdoor neighbor is an 87 year old cancer patient. He also got the virus, but they didn't intubate him and they didn't put him on ECMO. It just wouldn't have made sense. Even if they had done all that, his body likely wouldn't have been able to recover, and if it had: he was 87 and he had cancer. So he died peacefully at home with a little morphine.
Believe it or not, the situation won't be vastly different in the US than wherever you are. American hospitals don't turn people away from emergency rooms. They just eat the cost.
I don't want to change your mind about the Mad Maxness of healthcare in the US. I'm just bored and having fun with you.
Lol Good points. Can’t say I disagree. The last time I was in the US I saw someone with a “Don’t Tread on Me Shirt” shuffling through an airport line-up letting the TSA pat down his genitals.
Thanks for the lesson, I'm sure it will be useful for someone not yet informed.
Quoting frank
This is not what's being discussed.
Had the US taken the measures (it's now starting to take) such as cancel events and ramp up testing, and encourage everyone to take it "really seriously", declare an emergency, etc. earlier, then yes, I am in agreement with you: US health system would handle the health part more or less comparatively to Europe. The financial part would be a separate issue that would resolve afterwards one way or another, but the finances wouldn't be a crisis, just evidence for or against universal health care. The finance is the easiest part of this puzzle to solve.
The difference is that the US did not take those measures earlier, so we do not know how many cases are going to hit the health system all at once. Reports are the wave has started, so we're going to find out soon enough.
Once numbers exceed capacity for doctors, no matter how well trained and good intentioned, to deal with so many patients, then people start to go through all the stages you describe but without medical care.
The longer a country delays in taking measures to slow the rate of infection, the more people will be in the situation of "One night you find that you can hardly breathe, so you call an ambulance" but there is no ambulance, or then the ambulance takes you to a tent where you don't get any help.
The more people in such a situation, the greater the social and political consequences.
As per my original position, we are about to find out (yet again) why abandoning containment early was a crazy idea.
That the US saw things unfold in Italy and are now aiming for the Italy baseline as the best case scenario (which I hope transpires), is also crazy.
It's called end-of-life care. Remember your 87 year-old neighbor? He didn't burden the healthcare system too much. If he did visit the hospital, he was dispatched to hospice care as soon as compassion would allow. That usually involves a ride down the road to the people who are known for their generosity with morphine. It's paid for by Medicaid.
Many elderly or terminally ill people won't go to the hospital at all. Hospice comes to them at home. Medicaid pays again.
You seem to be concerned with all the young healthy people. Most of them will either have no symptoms, mild symptoms, or they'll feel like shit for a couple of weeks. They won't burden the system too much more than all the other viruses are already doing.
I'd be happy to join you in talking about triaging hundreds of people in one day, rounding them up in convention centers, etc. That's almost a philosophical issue (not quite.) There just isn't any reason at all to think that we'll need to do that. None.
There's also a big difference politically if marshal law is implemented or not. Even if it's not some sort of uprising, it's a highly symbolic event.
Carry on.
Ok, well let's talk in a week or two.
As triage is happening in Italy right now ... doesn't seem that philosophic to me. But if you only care about the states, then let's wait. If it doesn't happen, then we can talk hypothetically about "had it happened in the US".
Yes, I do care about the old and would rather anyone, old or young, get the care appropriate to the disease.
The disease affects young people less, yes, but many still need critical care and some still die, all at once it is not logistically possible to provide that care.
No one has, but please do try.
Fortunately, there's not much evidence it's really bad for babies, and I believe also pregnant women haven't had it particularly worse. Luckily, children really do seem fairly unaffected, which is definitely a silver lining in the situation.
It's going to be just like Mad Max. I'm telling you. Total disaster.
Avoid any site that asks for interaction. Don't download anything.
I've already explained it cannot get to a madmax outcome since 85-90% of cases recover easily. So letting it just go out of control and killing whomever it can as quickly as possible, wouldn't collapse society. The 90 - 95% (as not all people become cases) of people that survive can easily just carry on.
So, even if society chose to maximize deaths by doing absolutely nothing to slow infection, it's still not a mad max scenario.
Stop wagging your finger at that straw man.
However, just straight up letting 5% of people die without any attempt to help them is obviously not politically feasible.
Even 5000 isn't politically desirable as @ssu notes.
Italy is already at 3000 deaths mostly due to triage conditions (and it's not finished, if it peaked symmetrically right now deaths would end up about 6000 as a rough estimate, and current estimate is it's not peaking right now), so assuming 5000 triage deaths is a rough lower bound for deaths in the US (I don't think reasonable guess by a wide margin, but for the sake of argument, such as a scenario where containment was pursued competently); well, 5000 is not good, but not the worst cause of death this year by a long shot as has been well established on this thread. Unfortunate, but social and political consequences would not be extreme, one political football among many and one more disease for doctors to deal with (going the way of N1H1 that was soon mostly forgotten).
However, the only way to keep those deaths low is to slow the rate of infection. The reason Italy got to triage conditions is because they didn't take these measures early enough.
So between 5000 and 5 000 000 there's a wide spectrum of different health and political outcomes.
Since there's no adequate testing in the states, no way to get a good statistical understanding of the current status of infection (which then results in hospital visits in a 5-10 day lag, 10-15% of the time, which is a big number for something 70% of people could get in a short time frame).
So, infection rates could already be much higher than Italy, resulting in much more deaths. The more deaths, the more consequences to society through a bunch of second order effects I describe above.
As of right now it's 1809.
Loving it.
I'll let you know how it turns out, but so far, so good.
My strategy is not to get covid. Good luck with your made up words.
Even if the death rate were 5% of those infected, that wouldn't equate anywhere near 5% of the total population. Communicable diseases are common and with no controls at all come no where near infecting 100% of the population.
Then you should be more discrete about who you shack up with.
Dead people aren't infectious.
If you bathe in the in the juices of the recently departed prior to the death of their parasites, you could acquire their diseases. It's for that reason, and perhaps others, that necrophilia is frowned upon.
That joke is smirk funny, but not haha funny I'll admit, but so damn topical I couldn't withhold it. You're welcome.
If he does go to hospice care, he will kill off everyone else in the care home. So he won't be allowed in, again he will be taken to a tent. In the UK plans are being put in place to isolate care homes, I don't have the figures, but it will include over a million people. Then there is a large constituency of people who are medically compromised, or with an underlying health condition, over a million again. Then there are all the health and care workers, who do the caring of all these folk, a few million there. They might bring the virus into the protected group. If they become ill, they will have to go home, or go into a tent. This is just the tip of the iceberg, the larger group is everyone over 70 years of age, who will soon become isolated.
We will soon become tent city, khaki coloured.
1800+ as of yesterday. I can't find if there's a separate number for triage deaths though.
In my view there are three simple reasons why this won't be so huge:
a) People aren't going to tested en masse for the corona virus. Hence the vast majority who will get it, but don't have so severe symptoms that they need hospitalization, will simply not be seen in the stats. Already epidemiologists are saying that the likely infections are 20-30 times greater than the official statistics. Yet that's still not much.
b) A tiny fraction of the people having fever and flu symptoms are actually having covid-19. And quite likely a lot of those corona-virus victims will be misdiagnosed as being killed by ordinary flu. This will result, as I said earlier, in that we will be surprised at the statistic in historical studies (done in the 2030's and later) that put the number of deaths far higher than now are going to be informed.
c) The drastic measures taken now will surely have an effect on the death rate. That people take caution will have an effect.
"In a world where the organization of production is decentralized, fluid, and largely automated, where each machine is now but a link in an integrated system of machines that subsume it, and where this system-world of machines, of machines producing machines, tends to be unified cybernetically, each particular flow is a moment of the overall reproduction of capital's society. There is no longer a "sphere of reproduction" of labor power and social relations distinct from the sphere of production, which itself is no longer a sphere, but rather the web of the world with all its relations.
To physically attack these flows, at any point, is therefore to politically attack the system as a whole. If the subject of the strike was the working class, the subject of the blockade is whoever. It's anyone at all, anyone who takes a stand against the existing organization of the world. It's generally when they reach their maximun degree of sophistication that civilizations fall apart. Every production chain is now reaching such a level of specialization through so many intermediaries that if one of them disappeared that would be enough to paralyze, or even destroy, the whole chain."
This was a point that left a deep impression on me at the time, but I never imagined that the vector of attack would be not the dispossessed, but a simple, mindless, virus. There's a recent interview with Zizek which I really like too, where he maintains his blessed optimism for a better world among - perhaps especially because of - catastrophe:
Capitalism has never let a good disaster go to waste however, so the fight over the social and political significance of the virus is one still to be waged.
https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/what-we-do/news-stories/news/covid-19-outbreak-crisis-update-march-13?fbclid=IwAR1G4-3OBhuBjIu3WLvVrWBix1Q0uW8l27U8dDyrHEvxnA8YSpU-UwF7QyQ
I start with the assumption that containment fails, and that any measures of isolation will only slow the spread until (hopefully) acquired immunity stops the spread at about 80% infection rate.
So population times 80%, times (optimistically) 5%, Minus the number of people who can be treated with respirators will give you the death rate. Do you have more reliable figures?
It's been a week since I went to a bar/club. It's killing me. :sad:
Better clear up soon.
Yes, I was off by a factor of 0.3 in my lower bound estimate in making the point that order of magnitude differences in deaths have much different implications.
But it will be at 3000 shortly in Italy. Death rate is still rising
Quoting CNN
And this is with measures that were taken, albeit too late to avoid overload, but relatively proactively based on testing. So, the US could be much worse.
An order of magnitude worse would have very different implications not simply for the health system but for societally and politically. According to official confirmed cases, the number of cases increases by an order of magnitude every 2 weeks about, so waiting for that to happen by not testing and downplaying can have a massive difference in outcome. A week of delay of the needed response can mean 2 doubling times.
Of course, apologists for Trump will say "ahh, but he's learning now! he's doing what's needed now! He stopped the flights". This misses the point that response to this sort of situation needs to be quick and needs to be informed by real data. Neither of which happened, and so the situation is going to be bad. Howe bad will depend on how out of control the virus has been left to spread before extreme measures are taken.
As I'm sure you agree with this basic point.
And I'm sure you will also be amused that when deaths aren't in the "do nothing case" of millions, because "something was done", the same apologists for Trump will say "see, see, I told you so! not thaaaat many people died".
I've previously been arguing why "the sooner the better" for lowering the rate of infection, there is no scenario where the economic costs of stopping flights a month ago would be higher than the economic costs we're seeing now, nor is there a scenario where you want to "make a quick dash to heard immunity".
As an epidemiologist wrote:
Obviously, defending against a threat is not possible by letting that threat run rampant. It's like resolving a fire hazard in your house by burning down your house; yes, situation now resolved, but if the goal was to prevent or stop the fire the concept of "fires do burn out you know when they have no more fuel", isn't helpful. Yes, by maximizing the damage the damage can be mitigated.
Apparently the UK is walking back the whole "herd immunity strategy" and some officials are now explaining it was just "a medical concept" but not an actual strategy.
They've decided "isolate 70 year olds" is a nice stepping stone to ease themselves into admitting eventually, as in today or tomorrow, that they'll do as the rest of Europe is doing. BUT! And this is the critical point, their followers will remain ignorant of the easily avoidable mistakes made along that story arch of self realization.
It never was an actual strategy. The govt has never said it was, but perhaps not denying others' reports has caused speculation that it might be. Being quick and candid about their strategy has not been a strong point of UK govt communication so far!
Communicable diseases that aren't controlled but don't reach 100% is because the disease has a hard time spreading. Maybe very dangerous, but is not crazy infectious.
Something very infectious, like the flu, basically does infect close to 100% of people, just not in any given year as a large portion of the population still has immunity. But eventually, nearly everyone gets the flu at least once.
For a new disease, highly infectious, and no one has immunity, without controls, the base line assumption is it would infect about 70 percent of people, at least.
Once infected, including recovered and now immune, population passes 50 percent then the disease has a hard time finding new hosts, as now the majority of people are either recovered or already infected. Especially if those that aren't yet infected is because of behavior that lowers their chances, which is statically guaranteed. So 20 or 30 percent may not get infected.
For instance, something very infectious like cold sores, follows this pattern and it's thought 50 to 80% of adults have it. We aren't bothered too much by this because cold sores don't put 10% of people in intensive care within weeks of getting the disease, and large amounts of people are getting it for the first time because it's a new disease.
Which is why I used 70 percent of people get infected in my calculation.
However, that's only true for 1 wave. If the disease comes back in another wave, then statistically you're going to "get" part of that population that didn't get it the first time. And if it keeps coming back like the flu where one part of the population has lost immunity due to a new strain, then you'll get close to 100 percent over several waves. This maybe the case of corona.
But in terms of the short term consequences, I have been mainly discussing the first wave.
In the first wave, assuming the disease stays the same, and no effective treatment is found, especially applicable to large numbers that would otherwise be triaged, if nothing is done to slow the infection rate, such as the little measures that have been taken so far in the US, then numbers can get really big, really fast.
Clearly not anywhere close to the "uncontrolled" case, but big enough to cause major disruptions, and a single doubling time left to its own devices can result in a very different situation. Whatever problem you already have, now you have two of them.
"The flu" doesn't really describe a particular disease, but each year it's a different strain. If you're saying that at some point in everyone's life they'll get some viral infection, I think that's obvious, but that doesn't equate to saying that each year we should expect 100% (or anywhere close to it) will get that year's particular virus.
Quoting boethius
The answer to whatever your'e trying to figure out will be found by looking at actual infection rates over time, not by whatever calculations you're throwing together. I can say that I've never been in a school or work situation where 70% of the people were gone due to the flu.
Looks like there's going to be a short fall of maybe 50 million ventilators.
One of the problems is that some of the more simple forms of non-invasive ventilation, positive pressure masks for instance, produce aerosols, that spread infection.
That's exactly what I explain:
Quoting boethius
Why it's considered the same disease is because it's phenomenologically similar, and descends fro the previous strains, just like you're considered the same person even if you cut your hair -- your different, but still the same person. A new strain that defeats immunity can be a small change like different hair for the virus; so it's considered the same disease, and the word "strain" is used to differentiate. That's why I used the word strain ... and also why you used the word strain in the same sentence as making the overall point that "it's actually a different disease".
Quoting Hanover
Again, my comment explains why this is the case. Many people are immune to the new flu at any given time, and many others have so mild symptoms they think it's just a cold. So not everyone gets it any given year.
But take a new strain of highly infectious flu, such as happened in 1918, that no one seems immune to, and a high mortality rate relative the "normal flu" we have today, and the situation is very different.
My calculations are based on what we know so far.
- It's highly infectious
- No one has existing immunity to it
- It has demonstrated ability to kill of 0.5 - 1 % percent of cases in good care conditions, such as South Korea were infection rate was lowered to a manageable number, at least so far.
- It has demonstrated ability to kill 3 - 5 percent of cases in sub-optimal care conditions, such as Wuhan and Italy, were cases exceeded the medical systems ability to handle them.
- We do not know how many "mild" infections there are that don't result in cases, but the ice-burg hypothesis seems extremely unlikely at this time, as random sampling testing of the population has not revealed an iceberg of mild or asymptomatic cases, as is being done in Germany; there are some of these asymptomatic or super mild, but not close to twice as many, much less on the order of 10 times needed to significantly lower the danger and change policy to "it's not so bad guys", it is a few percent in this category.
Now, there can be lot's of infections that are in the incubation or first symptoms stage that have not moved yet towards cases and hospitalizations, but that is simply a time lag problem matching observations to the best model of what's going on requires estimating those infections and extrapolating critical care cases. However, in the "uncontrolled spread" scenario we don't care about current cases, just a ballpark estimate of infection to case ratio, and case fatality in triage conditions.
So, if left to go out of control, we could estimate 70% of people on the earth getting it this year, and if we conservatively estimate there's double undiagnosed and never diagnosed infections currently, so a 2.5% infection fatality that then matches up with 5% case fatality, then this is 120 million deaths this year.
I have not seen any data or analysis to suggest uncontrolled spread would far lower, such as 0.2%, than that estimate.
Of course, it's completely unfeasible to have an uncontrolled spread policy, so we're seeing extreme actions that will have a large affect on how things play out: these extreme actions are motivated to avoid this 70% infected, 1-5% infection fatality situation.
It's probably the case that eventually everybody will be infected by one of the various strains of influenza A (and may or may not experience a significant result) but don't you have to factor in vaccinations? Even though only 40% (+ or -) of adults get vaccinated for influenza each year, that is still many millions of people who won't get, and thus won't transmit, the influenza virus.
There is no need to pretend. A Libertarian is both a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. Libertarians are often mischaracterized, which is probably why you don't even understand what a Libertarian is.
Quoting praxis
Socialists can only be authoritarian as they think they know what is "good" for everyone, and want to impose their morality on everyone else. It really is no different than a religion.
True enough: "The flu" (as the term is used) may be any of several unrelated infections -- like a rhinovirus, a norovirus, or a bacterial disease. "Stomach flu" has nothing to do with influenza. "Influenza (A, B, and C) is a specific virus with specific genetic components. Type A infects both birds and swine, which is how it gets reorganized into its yearly version of fresh hell. Type A is the cause of epidemics and pandemics. Types B and C are usually not as serious.
Then there is "diplomatic influenza", where one is conveniently indisposed to go to work, attend a boring meeting, or a dull party.
Flu vaccine doesn't really change the conclusion, as it does not provide 100% immunity, flu is constantly evolving to defeat the vaccine policy.
And what is essentially for certain is there won't be a vaccine for this first wave, which I'm currently focusing on as lot's of members of the discussion don't seem to understand the implications of this first wave.
A good basis of comparison to this first wave is the flu but no one's immune, and a high case fatality rate, as with the Spanish flu.
What's different today is that global travel, because there was no travel freeze when it could have made big difference, has done a great job of mixing up the disease in the major economies in a short period of time.
But don't you want to impose your morality of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism on everyone else?
I agree, I wan to impose my morality of rule of law, universal health care, free education, and similar institutions on everyone. But don't you want to impose your morality of property rights, police and courts to manage those property rights, maybe some fire fighters, on everyone?
Seems, as per your definition, just a different kind of religion, just less institutions are desired but no fundamental difference. You claim your morality, if imposed on everyone, would be the best for society, so do I.
The implications is those that survive will be immune. Viral Vaccines are often an injection of a lesser form of the virus so that your body builds immunity to the real thing. Some people even get a symptoms of the flu after getting the vaccine.
Quoting boethius
Thanks, China.
SARS (Severe acute respiratory syndrome) is a good example. SARS (another corona virus) jumped from animals to humans and first appeared in China in 2002, then showed up in several distant places. SARS has a very high fatality rate (15%, and 55% for elderly patients).
Yes, I've made that assumption clear. One of the unknown risks of the disease is re-infection rates of the same strain, which can happen with some disease, and of course mutation into a new strain.
If you're just repeating my points, thanks for pointing that out.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, I think it very plausible China wanted to maintain air travel to make sure everyone else suffered as much or worse, in a zero-sum game view of geopolitics.
However, we've had all the data needed to make an optimum containment strategy regardless of what China wants. The West didn't pursue an optimum containment strategy, for neo-liberal ideological reasons according to my analysis, and the West is now paying the price for inviting the virus in to grow in an explosive manner, and soon essentially everyone will pay the price.
There were lot's of policy tools available to slow the spread to something manageable and all the information needed to design such policy since the start of the year.
Yes, but the difference with SARS is that, because it was so dangerous, containment was serious and effective.
We not only allowed Coronavirus to spread by plane, but abandoned effective containment as to not annoy a lot of plane travelers and so as to avoid a small decrease in airline and boeing stock 2 months ago. Obviously, not realizing airline stocks would be far lower as well as the stock market in general if containment was not pursued seriously, just shows how easily Western leaders are deluded by their own propaganda. Coronavirus is less dangerous than SARS, for the moment anyway, but still dangerous enough to cause all these extreme measures to be taken now; however, it seemed it was below a psychological threshold for our leaders and the general population to not take it seriously.
It's like dismissing a danger that will cut off your hand because "well, it's not like it's my head". Of course, anyone who has such an idea clearly changes it when their hand is being crushed in the gearing. Completely predictable. Easy to talk a tough game of "not even a head bro, not even a head", a lot harder to be zen when one's hand is being slowly pulverized.
Continental Europe, slightly less deluded and so slightly more responsible, but the UK and US reactions have really shown who has drank most of the coolaid.
Lol. Do you even understand what that means? It means that we don't need a bloated govt to tell everyone else how to live. A Libertarian is fine with a restructured police force (the one we have now gives them too much power to avoid the repercussions of abusing their power and they often do). Libertarians want less govt and that means minimizing any one group or individual imposing their ideals on others.
But you still need a government to tell people to live within the laws that you have in your system, and maintain the institutions to accomplish that.
You're just saying your religion with 3 rules is not a religion compared to a religion with 5 rules.
However, your society still has to compete with other society's, so if 5 good rules are better than 3, people may change their religion to the 5 rules because it has better outcomes.
Really? Care to point out where you said that?
Quoting boethius
All of which wouldn't matter if China had closed their borders first and didn't produce misinformation from outset. The outrage about this whole crisis is misplaced. People are so emotional about Trump that they blame him more than the Chinese. It's pathetic to see one's politics overcome one's reason.
Everybody who goes to hospice is about to die. But I take your point. A sudden outbreak in a community where no one has immunity yet could briefly overwhelm the system. So the cancellations of large gatherings makes sense.
There's no proof of this.
For instance, I would argue that healthy educated people can more easily minimize one group of individuals imposing their ideals on others.
Health and education make people more capable and efficient.
Now, granted, to have these healthy educated people we need to impose the ideal of wanting a healthy and educated population and pursue policies that accomplish that. I am willing to impose that ideal on society, not ashamed to say it.
Now, let's say to get rid of me imposing this ideal, you convince everyone that, even if they agree with that ideal they shouldn't impose it through the institution of voting that you do pursue, along with me, imposing on people. Ok, voting is part of the 3 ideals that you do impose on people, along with the police and property rights, no need to debate why, of course, as that may lead to a framework of reasoning from which to impose a dreaded 4th ideal, which we want to avoid, so better not to know why these 3 institutions but no more!
People agree, vote to ensure there's not an optimum health or education public policy, not even close.
Time passes, let's say, purely for the sake of argument, someone comes along who's clearly a corrupt self centered narcissist and also incompetent along most dimensions of institutions management, even 3 is too much for him; but low educated people like him and vote for him, he gets into office, imposes his ideal of a trillion dollar deficit on everyone and then incompetently manages the small public health institution you did allow in a sort of 3.5 institutions reasoning, that institution was then inefficient in stopping a public health crisis, and that leader, thinking nothing other than his own ego and money, did nothing to intervene early, because government intervention should be minimized and he has no clue what's going on anyways before it's too late to prevent a serious crisis.
Then the crisis unfolds, and large portions of people's freedoms you've been trying to preserve with your system, such as the freedom to just travel and meet who and where you want in whatever number you want, are now curtailed. Is this more or less freedom than the freedom lost in other people having access to health care and education that would mitigate, maybe even completely prevented, this "severe freedom restrictions" scenario?
Just, purely for the sake of argument, what if "less institutions" to ensure "more freedom" actually resulted in "less institutions causing less freedom"?
You still dont get it. Libertarians arent concerened with telling others how to live. They only rule is "Do as you will but dont tread on me".
Proof? Lol. The proof is in the definition. If you don't understand the basic concepts of what you are talking about than what are you even doing discussing it? Go educate yourself.
But that's telling people how to live. You're telling them not to tread on you.
To make sure it's not a suggestion but an ideal enforced as best you can, you want police and a justice system to safeguard property rights. Maybe other institutions to then safeguard those institutions, etc.
If your scheme isn't enough institutions designed in the right way to be stable, you may lose even those institutions you think are in fact necessary and someone treads on you hard.
I am arguing public education and health policies protect more from the situations you want to avoid, not less. What's your counter argument? Other than telling me how to live and to not tread on you.
I just explained it is no proof.
Unless you have some extreme position where you don't want the police, justice system ensuring property rights are defined and allocated, voting for management of at least these systems, then you are admitting that to pursue your goal you need some institutions.
You have no proof that your list of institutions and laws is actually optimum, or even remotely close to the optimum, to pursue your goal.
It's like saying "I want to travel light, as less mass means less energy needed to get to where I am going; therefore, I will walk naked from New York to San Fransisco without any supplies at all". Then saying "proof by definition!" when someone points out this doesn't follow in the slightest.
They are still free to try and tread on me, but then can they handle the consequences of their actions? This is basic human psychology and natural behavior that all organisms engage in. Invading ones territory will illicit a response from the organism whose territory you're invading. Wil you come out unscathed? Will it be worth it? These are questions reasonable people would ask themselves. Reasonable people who don't rely on someone else to tell them how to live their life. Some people are weak and look to others to define them and tell them how they should live. That isn't me. If that's you then thats good for you, not me.
Ok, so you don't want even the institutions of the police and justice system?
Don't tell me what to do bro.
Weirdly some of these facilities will be required to admit infected acute cases, while protecting the healthcare workers from infection. There may even develop a circumstance where acute cases are warehoused while they die ( khaki tents).
An issue with banning large gatherings has been highlighted, in that it might result in numerous small gatherings in confined spaces. For example holding football games with no crowd, resulting in many fans congregating in pubs to watch the game on big screens.
P.s. I'm not expecting you to reply to all that, I'm addressing the whole thread really.
*an example of disruption occurred in a hospital near me the other day. There was a scare that a patient with a persistent cough had the virus, he was tasted and found to be clear, but in the meantime rumours spread far and wide that there was an infected person in there. This resulted in healthcare workers, cleaners and maintenance staff not going in to work.
A hospice facility isn't a care home. It's palliative care.
Quoting Punshhh
Aren't you British?
That leaves 99.98 % of the population uninfected and about 100% of us not killed by this epidemic.
- 272 infections, no deaths yet reported. Let's see how the toilet paper situation will develop.
No one is disputing that.
The question is how those numbers grow over time under different responses.
Evidence we have at the moment is letting it grow out of control would lead to about 100 millions deaths.
Those would show up in your significant figures.
If you say "well, they won't grow that high because something will be done", then you've joined the discussion about what should have been done before, even a week ago to avoid 2 or 3 doubling times, what should be done right now, what should be done later, and how these actions affect society in second order consequences, like people losing jobs and so on.
Those at risk of death can take whatever precaution they need to. The average person is just going to get flu like symptoms or less. It's a disproportionate shotgun response, showing how panic and fear of any risk leads to a terrible result.
This number may seem low to you, but the number of infected is some multiple of the current number of diagnosed cases.
Some proportion of infected will develop symptoms and become cases some days from now, and some of those will be critical care patients.
No deaths means those critical within the 272 infections are getting the care they need.
If the trend elsewhere is reoccurring in Finland, then there's about 20 to 40 people in critical care, or will enter critical care shortly, among this group.
That's already quite a lot in normal times. Nothing overwhelming, but not a drop in the bucket either.
Also, don't confuse "beds" with care. From what I have read, major cities typically have a dozen or two of these respirators. Treating crucial cases of this disease requires not only equipment but highly intensive care by skilled doctors and nurses. Keeping someone alive who would otherwise be dead without intervention is no easy task.
Because infections lag behind cases, and grow exponentially without extreme measures, this 272 number has already doubled one or several times in terms of people infected. At this stage, it depends on a lot of factors, so we'll only know later if it's more or less compared to other countries that are further along. But, it's already enough critical care patience "in the pipe" to saturate quality care capacity for these symptoms.
Policy makers in Finland have exactly the same analysis which is why they are shutting things down now, rather than later. For, let's say 1000 critical care patients is the capacity limit, if you wait to reach that thousand, repeat the above logic, and you have at least 2000 -- since doubling times are shorter than infection to critical care times -- maybe even more, 4000 or 8000 or even 16 000, depending on how out of control infections are.
Keep in mind, once restrictions are implemented, they are not instant in reducing infections; there is an initial period of society "getting into it". So not only are there doubling times already "out there" but there is probably at least another doubling time that is unavoidable while society reconfigures for quarantine.
Um, no, letting morons crowd into pubs and football matches (which they will because some people are incapable of understanding math and science) will result in far more deaths and hospitalizations than a strict response. Your medical system would collapse and people suffering other conditions wouldn't be able to get the help they need either. Plus, fuckwitts walking around like nothing is wrong may not suffer very serious effects but they will become vectors spreading to others, one of twenty of whom will die, and the rest will become more vectors etc. If minimizing deaths is the goal (which presumably we share), then not only are we not doing too much, we're not doing enough.
Yes, I'm British, I don't see the relevance though?
Interesting report about how the Chinese semi controlled their virus. (Not by keeping everyone at home.)
Easier said than done.
First, not all cases are from at-risk-groups, so even if you succeeded in isolating at-risk-groups, you'd still have a huge amount of cases from allowing exponential growth to occur unimpeded in all low-risk groups.
Second, isolation of at-risk-groups is basically impossible. People need to interact to survive. Even doctors and nurses with proper gear are getting infected, that's how infectious this disease is, so there's simply no way to prevent it getting into care-homes where workers don't have gear, don't know how to use it, and there's none available anyways.
Agreed, at-risk-groups that can effectively self-isolate should self-isolate, but even if that's completely effective that won't prevent overwhelming amounts of cases coming from at-risk-groups that can't self-isolate, that need quotidian care to survive from younger people, nor would it stop an overwhelming amount of cases from low-risk-groups, that are more numerous so a smaller percentage becoming critical care cases is still overwhelming anyways.
Keep in mind, the low-risk of dying for healthy and younger people is not the same as the risk of needing critical care. One reason the death age is so old, is because the old are triaged in favor of the young.
It is the critical care percentage that matters in terms of public policy. Maxing out critical care capacity means needing to triage both new cases and every other medical problem that arises from heart attacks to gunshot wounds.
The only way to protect high-risk-groups and low-risk-groups and all goups in between in terms of total number of deaths as well as preventing overload of the system is, at this point, through extreme measures that affect everyone.
UK will do the same as @ssu reports Finland is doing. These "changes in strategy" is simply propaganda to walk from "oh, crap, it is a problem I should have realized will hurt the stock market much more by downplaying it compared to being proactive" to the inevitable position of "all hands on deck! to prevent more spread and get this under control! for queen and country lads!" without admitting to any mistakes and pretending it was "people's loved ones" that were the center most priority all along, just a few understandable course corrections along the way; we managed bold and brilliantly really, an unfeasibly high intellectual standard close to some godlike omniscience such as Thomas the Train couldn't have done any better, get off our backs about it, you're just using people who are suffering from our mismanagement for your own political gain!!! meany-boys!!! vote for us again.
Simply put, Libertarians primary value personal liberty, whereas Liberals (American at least) value fairness and care above liberty.
Are you still equating liberals and socialists?
All political brands are like religion in the way that you mean.
It's been estimated that infections are about 20-30 times more. No one has any idea what it is now.
Quoting boethius
Actually there is only one elderly corona-virus patient in intensive care.
Quoting boethius
Everybody has accepted the fact that Finland is simply lagging behind Sweden and Norway. The measures now taken are to curb the height of the epidemic. But they are accepting that the country is in the epidemic phase. Anyway, interesting to see what the effects are.
Quoting boethius
The restrictions and voluntary cancellations of meetings started last week and people started to change their behavior basically last weekend. The weekend before that things were normal.
After tomorrow, I have to say that I'm not living anymore in an ordinary Western Republic as the emergency laws take hold (let's see what they come with) and the ordinary individual liberties aren't anymore. The emergency laws will surely pass Parliament as the opposition has already demanded them.
But on the positive side, I have two happy children that at least now are excited that there's no school and they can sleep late. Let's see what their attitude is after one month of home schooling.
:clap: This needs to happen everywhere and now, not when the damage is already done.
Then we're in agreement.
Quoting ssu
At the early stage, the cases-to-critical ratio care can be far from the global average. But there's no reason to believe it won't approach fairly closely the global average. It is possible by some genetic quirk that protects Fins, but essentially zero reason to predict that.
Of diagnosed cases now, many maybe critical care cases but just haven't developed to that stage yet; it can take 5-10 days from symptoms to critical care. Additionally, the first clusters to get infected can happen to all be low-risk-groups, which is basically blind luck but really significant if measures are then put in place to stop further spread moving quickly towards "well mixed" in society.
Quoting ssu
I don't think this is quite fair. It's certainly not an ordinary circumstance, but personal liberties are always relative some standard of the public good: you can't walk in the middle of the highway, you can't just carry buckets of gasoline with you to the super market for fun, you can't yell "fire" in a crowded theater, you can't build and sell houses not to code, you can't do a lot of things that are reckless in likelihood to cause harm. It's just the conditions of what actions will likely cause harm are changed under the pandemic. It's extremely unusual for conditions to change so radically, but the same logic can be still the same and people agree to this framework.
These measures for sure would be draconian if done for political control purposes, and that can be a duel purpose and is certainly a concern -- i.e. China; South Korea to an extent as well with their tracking app -- but the situation I think is not adequately described as "losing Western liberties", as such in most Western places ... of course, second order effects could definitely go in this direction, but I'm not too concerned about Finland in this regard. You're not arguing these points, but without making the above distinction there's no quick and easy retort, is my point; and people were making such arguments during the "great minimizing".
That "it's draconian" is only an argument if you really think the risk is low and so believe this is added weight to the "do nothing" argument. Just like banning flights from China is "racist" is only an additional propaganda argument that makes sense if you really do believe the risk is low and there's no reason to ban flights from China on the merits of the science of epidemiology, so smearing one's opponents as racist is a "good trick" to protect the share prices of airlines.
Quoting ssu
I completely agree the results of this general social experiment will be incredibly interesting on many levels.
I'd suspect this is just a thing of statistical variance. As all known infections here have or can be traced to abroad, it's likely that the vast majority of the victims are in good health (as very weak old people don't travel). It can easily change especially if an elderly home gets the virus etc. I'm just thinking of my frail 80-year old father who is living alone at home. He is visited twice daily by health care personnel, so I'm just wondering how large that group of people running there at his home is. Talk about a quarantine. But now when he goes to the hospital for treatment, every time a single room.
Quoting boethius
Oh I put the words like that just to get NOS4A2 to tell us "See, I told you so!"
Once these restrictions have continued for a while I guess some people both in the US and in Finland are a fertile ground for conspiracy theories: that the corona-virus is a devious sinister plot by the extremely rich to oppress innocent people and get the "sheeple" to be even more obedient.
There is hospice in the UK. It's separate from longterm nursing care. I think you meant that workers for a longterm nursing facility avoided work because of rumors of coronavirus. That's possible. Hospital workers? No, I don't believe it.
It was Norwich hospital, but I can't confirm who refused to go in to the facility, as I heard a doctor from the hospital talking on talk radio about the rumours.
Still might go out on Friday. Fuck it.
Which if it becomes widespread, make a nonsense of any herd immunity, and makes a vaccine more problematic. Don't panic. Yet.
Well, doesn't make nonsense, as most people seem to be immune from reinfection ... at least until now (immunity can be surprisingly short term for some pathogens).
But these single cases, unless indicating a general trend, are not very worrisome in themselves. If it's an isolated thing, it doesn't have any effect on general immunity. Also, while these cases are small in number, it's difficult to exclude a false negative for recovering in the first place. So they test twice ... but then it's difficult to exclude two false negatives in a row on occasion.
However, that immunity may not be long lasting, is a very troubling possibility. An additional reason anyone who downplayed the threat while it broke out in Wuhan ... then downplayed the threat when it broke out in South Korea ... and triple-downed-downplayed the threat when it broke-out in Italy, is simply a fool.
It's difficult to avoid the smell, but I would probably use khaki, or Olive green. Whereas for the smell, it would be a rainbow palette.
The principal researcher is a professor of infectious diseases, not a crank or crackpot. The two anti-virals being tested are chloroquine (which used to treat malaria) and an HIV drug.
Didn't you mean "fuckwit"?
:cool:
We are going to be on lock down from midnight for an indefinite period. :gasp:
Will 3 cases of beer, 2 bottles of rum, 2 baileys lookalike, 2 of whiskey and several other partially used bottles be enough? :chin:
Uh, didn't notice at first. But yeah, FAKE NEWS™!
When I compared this press conference to the statement given by my young 34.year old prime minister (who I'm not a great fan as she is a social democrat) alongside her administration, she was far more assertive, serious and determined when announcing the country going to emergency laws with 19. points to follow. Those 19 points stated weren't asking people to consider something, they were implementations, this and that institutions will close etc. Also the economic side was immediately responded to: how to help especially all those companies and jobs that are severely hindered by the actions (restaurants, services etc), how much money will immediately be pumped into the economy.
Hence Trump perhaps could have been more serious if he would have had also the Fed Chairman and/or the Secretary of the Treasury next to him announcing what actions will be taken as limiting over 10 person meetings will mean that the economy will go into a tailspin. I know, he has made in other briefings statements, yet I think they should be in the same press conference.
Or perhaps notice the difference how the French President put it:
The COVID-19 virus is spreading exponentially fast.
Let me tell you a story: There was once a man who invented Chess. The King was so pleased, he offered the man a reward. “There are sixty four squares on a Chessboard,” said the man, "All I want is one grain of wheat for the first square, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, sixteen for the fifth, and so on.” The King eagerly agreed thinking it was a paltry price to pay, only to discover, to his horror, the nature of exponential growth. Essentially, on the very last square alone of the Chessboard, the King had to pay to the man, 9,220,000,000,000,000,000. or in words: nine quintillion, two hundred and twenty quadrillion, grains of wheat.
This presentation from MSNBC goes into exponential growth concerning COVID-19 more thoroughly.
Watch that clip above...
There is genuine reason to be concerned... Unfortunately, even though it clearly shows how unreliable the economy(wall street) is as a pillar of US lives and livelihood, that will not even be discussed nor will it be changed to something like as much self-sufficiency as possible which is what a real robust economy looks like.
This pandemic would look very different if it did not affect/effect everyone... financially.
Yay globalism!
What exactly are you referring too? There was going to be some form of nervous behavior. Buying toilet paper in bulk is harmless enough. I see social cooperation where I'm at.
A month or two from now we might have something to worry about.
The stock market, perhaps?
Essentially any kind of irrational behavior that would lead towards a bubble or market failure.
And, since the market has fallen so drastically, and such a drop has never occurred in the past, then I suppose the point is that people are really irrational...
Actually, such drops have occurred in the past, and yes, people as a whole are really irrational.
People are watching MSNBC for "information"? Mind-boggling. That said, yes people are inherently not able to understand exponential growth.
Not of this magnitude!
This is based on data from China. So containment was never possible. The only goal of shutdowns is to slow the spread to keep the number of severe cases below health system capacity.
This disease is no where near as lethal as it originally appeared to be.
Based on your reading of the article, how lethal do you think it is?
Really? Do you have data for that? Don´t have reference right now, but I think I have see worse, and looking at the various indexes right now, I think much more is to come. For example, when the Japanese real estate bubble poppet in the 90s, the Nikkei went from about 38000 to 20000. Right now, we are nowhere close to a selloff like that yet.
From the data we have, mortality rate is about 3%, and that consisting mostly of elderly, no? Yes, it is bad but it is not the end of the world.
Less than we thought.
Sepia and puce.
In a dream lastnight, death walked into the room, as I was staring to see him, the lights were extinguished. In the total darkness I felt helpless and woke up with a fright.
It's not lethal to the human species, it will just clear out some of the dead wood. Wheather it is civilised is another question.
How about a rough guess? Give me a number.
Are you saying that since the number of known cases in US now is 4,500 and deaths 88, that if we multiply the knowns by 5 to 10 and divide 88 by that, that the real death rate is likely between 0.2% and 0.4%?
Does the mentioned Chinese data gathered after testing became widespread support such a conclusion?
Quoting Nobeernolife
3% is higher than the original estimate of 2%.
I suspect that this thing is eventually going to kill members of my family. Many are older and are smokers and otherwise unhealthy. I'll likely live, as I am relatively healthy, but much pain is coming. End of the world? No. But possibly devastating to me personally.
These figures don't show the true figure, firstly some of the infected people who are going to die, haven't died yet, they're still in life support. Secondly the Hospitals haven't been overwhelmed yet. So the patients are getting the best intensive care at the moment. But later on scarce resources will be triaged and given to those patients who have more of a chance of survival and those who don't will be left to die, with minimal treatment. So the mortality rate will go up.
We had a pretty decent speech yesterday from the Prime Minister. The goal is maximum control so that our health system can cope. They want to avoid a full lock down because not getting any sick means next time corona passes by your have the same problem. So get people sick while the health care system can cope and get some level of group immunity, hopefully the first time it passes through the Netherlands.
The numbers officially reported for the Netherlands are way off, except the deaths of course. The test is not accurate when you don't show symptoms because of low viral load so they decided to not test many people early on. I suspect over 10.000 infected here.
Did you really dream that?
I do have a history of premonitions in dreams, I think this was a premonition, but it is not clear at the moment if it was, or what it indicated.
I think you are pointing at the real problem here. It is not just the Corona itself, but the ripple effect. What do you do if all the hospitals are clogged with Corona patients? If so many people need hospital care at once, the system will reach capacity. Better not break your leg while this is going on.
So death is a he? How sexist. :-)
Which way, discriminatory against women, or men?
I realised that when I was typing, for for artistic effect I decided to go with he.
It originally appeared to have a case fatality rate of around 3%, which would suggest an actual mortality of 0.3 to 1%.
However, Italy is experiencing a CFR of above 7.5%. So as far as the numbers are concerned, it's actually more lethal. Of course, conditions in Italy are bad and tests are probably limited to severe cases. But it's still an indication that the virus can indeed be at least as dangerous as initially suspected.
Just checked and he's from north Wales which is why it doesn't sound like an English accent.
You'll know after it happens? Cool.
Such Fake News and misinformation.
[tweet]https://twitter.com/CureVacAG/status/1239535638359281664?s=20[/tweet]
CureVac say one thing, the German health minister another. Which is the fake news? How am I, the independent third party, to figure that out?
Don’t listen to just one side of the story, especially from unidentified sources.
The German health ministry are obviously a more trustworthy source than some random corporation, I would say. And, of course, NOS our local Whitehouse spokestroll, would say that.
That’s not what the article you posted said.
“ Welt am Sonntag quoted an unidentified German government source as saying Trump was trying to secure the scientists' work exclusively, and would do anything to get a vaccine for the United States, "but only for the United States."
I think this is in many countries the policy. The objective is to curb the epidemic not hitting everybody at the same time, but that it will be more of a slow burner that the health care system can deal with the patients.
"Contacted by Reuters, a spokeswoman for the German Health Ministry said: "We confirm the report in the Welt am Sonntag."
“ A German Health Ministry spokeswoman, confirming a quote in the newspaper, said: "The German government is very interested in ensuring that vaccines and active substances against the new coronavirus are also developed in Germany and Europe."
"In this regard, the government is in intensive exchange with the company CureVac," she added.
Welt am Sonntag quoted an unidentified German government source as saying Trump was trying to secure the scientists' work exclusively, and would do anything to get a vaccine for the United States, "but only for the United States."
CureVac issued a statement on Sunday, in which it said: "The company rejects current rumors of an acquisition".
The firm said it was in contact with many organizations and authorities worldwide, but would not comment on speculation. It rejected "allegations about offers for acquisition of the company or its technology."”
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/15/world/europe/15reuters-health-coronavirus-germany-usa.html
What's ironic about this is that while calling for others not to trust "one side" of the story, you immediately describe it as "fake news". As far as I'm concerned, it's very plausible, but I wouldn't fully commit myself one way or the other.
You went on repeat quotes that either did not appear in the article or was removed. Were you sharing real news?
But if you're a socialist, you need others to tell you what to do. You need the govt to tell you to wash your hands and to maintain social distancing, and not to go out in large groups. You're like a little worker ant who gets all its instructions from its Queen Mother.
Libertarians don't need to be told what to do. So you're a Libertarian and don't even know it.
Take Michael's quote up with Michael. My point stands. You function here as a government spokesman/Trump spin provider. Nothing more. You're not in a position to talk about unbiased judgements.
Why didn't I follow your instruction then? If I "need" others to tell me what to do?
Seems your theory doesn't link predictions to observations. Maybe time to junk your theory because it's not validated by what you can see with your very eyes. If I "needed" people to tell me what do to, I would have done what you say, thankful that you took the lead on this issue.
Had I not corrected the record some would have went on believing misinformation, which you tried to defend.
Its TDS..... more persistant than Corona.
ISIS issues travel ban on fanatics and tells them to ‘put faith in God’ to combat coronavirus
Niamh Cavanagh
The Sun
Mar 2020
Dude, disaster in the works.
Some have apparently hoarded toilet paper, we grabbed some coffee, but is it enough?
You are Jeff Bezos, and I claim my £5.
It was changed from what I and Baden posted to what you posted.
Here it is from Reuters.
Regarding the named official, it was actually the interior minister, not the health minister (I conflated the above re. the health ministry spokeswoman and the below):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/germany-coronavirus-curevac-vaccine-trump-rights/2020/03/15/8d684c68-6702-11ea-b199-3a9799c54512_story.html
In either case, I might struggle later on, to get a visa back into Russia in July as I'd planned.
Trying to work out if I could get a visa extension and stay here, I called the British Embassy in Moscow, thinking they might be helpful. "You'll have to contact the relevant Russian authorities," they said apologetically. Then they gave me a link to the Russian Embassy in London. I called them and they were not only unhelpful but also unfriendly (she was Russian and trained in the Russian style of customer service). So I asked the question on a Moscow expats Facebook group. One person said contact the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Another said no it's the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Someone else said no it's the Central Immigration Centre. Yet another person said no, they have nothing to do with visas. Someone suggested I go to Thailand.
Just moaning.
Quoting Punshhh
I don't think there's a choice now, unless you choose some kind of oblivion*. We're all swept up in this.
* I'm drinking Russian cognac as I write
In the US, meanwhile...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/us-sales-guns-ammunition-soar-amid-coronavirus-panic-buying?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR3DYBmXIcaEcW7YaQqv7UMMASpsxefRClTzjkoTM5wVrm_SMtvILulbklY#Echobox=1584383865
How is the pandemic perceived in Russia?
Somehow, I doubt the Russians will deport you and they can't really accuse you of intending to stay beyond your visa.
You can return to the UK and self isolate for 7 days, then live with your parents and help them self isolate.
I got a TRX thing and some bands the other day in preparation for this eventuality. You can get a full body weight workout and it doesn’t take up any space in your house. Also not as expensive as dumbbells and such.
Yes, that's my top plan right now. Stay in a hotel, or a cottage in the mountains, for 7-10 days till I'm sure I'm ok, and then go to them.
Moscow is fairly relaxed. No signs of panic buying, barely any face masks in the streets or even on the metro (that was a few days ago--I'm avoiding it now and staying at home).
I don't know if I should admire the response of the Russian people or be worried: people are spreading stupid conspiracy theories and pretending the threat doesn't exist.
Which part was incorrect? Where I said it was the health minister rather than the interior minister?
A week ago, I had a dream that might have featured a similar figure. I saw an empty building complex at night, vaguely resembling my old high school. Behind it, looming large and looking over the complex at me, was a humanoid figure whose presence was negative. He was like a black hole in space with a humanoid shape. There was a sense of gravity, like he was sucking everything in. The sillhouette of his head seen straight on resembled a pair of hands splayed out like wings. His face was like a howling abyss into which it seemed I could fall. He wordlessly communicated a sense of "I am here. I am coming." There was an apocalyptic feeling about the dream. Other ominous dreams followed that night.
Was that death? I don't know, but it was certainly disturbing!
The original source was unnamed. You appeared to deny that. The only thing that drops your credibility more than putting up false information is subsequently refusing to admit it.
NOS4A2 claimed that it was an "unidentified source" which was false. My only mistake was in claiming that it was the health minister rather than a spokeswoman for the health ministry and the interior minister - a mistake which I did admit to.
The original source was unnamed. The official you refer to merely stated that he "heard" from several other unnamed people that the story is true. Are you saying you took that to be the identification of a source? Seriously?
Maybe you should go back and read the actual exchange again. I asked NOS4A2 if I should believe CureVac who are denying the story or if I should believe the health minister[sup]1[/sup] who is confirming the story. He then told me that I shouldn't believe unidentified sources. Except I'm not suggesting that I might believe an unidentified source. I'm suggesting that I might believe the health minister[sup]1[/sup].
[sup]1[/sup] Actually the interior minister and a spokeswoman for the health ministry.
When I first saw the story, it caught my attention that the source was unnamed. That did impact my assessment of the story. It should have done the same for you.
This is my strategy: when in doubt, remain in doubt. Don't budge from doubt without good information unless you're in the basement of the Enterprise and Captain Kirk is demanding that you fix the engine without knowing how. Then you jump to conclusions and go to it.
I don't see that you had any reason to budge from doubt here. But you did. Fine. When called on it, you should have said:
"That's true. The original source was unnamed, and that's a tad suspicious."
End of story. See how that works?
There was a news article from a German paper that referred to an unnamed source. A spokeswoman for the health ministry and the interior minister confirmed the story. CureVac denied the story. I'm asking if I should believe the government officials who confirmed the story or if I should belive CureVac who denied the story. Whether or not the original news article referred to an unnamed source is irrelevant at this point given the confirmation by identified individuals (individuals who, given their government roles, are presumably in a position to know the facts).
I'm totally ready to stand corrected here. I didn't see where the story was confirmed by anyone else. That the story is being talked about: that was confirmed.
Help me out. Name the person who actually has knowledge of the facts and did confirm the story.
I did that here which was the comment you responded to.
Again: there's no name.
This person is named, but can't confirm anything other than that the story is being talked about.
So you did it again. You continue to obscure the fact that there is no named source in the article.
I have plenty of food as well, just not sure how important that is. The booze comes from outside the country and the borders are closed. The food comes from mostly local produce, and they are letting those people continue working still.
Why the hell does anyone need to 50 toilet rolls? Have there been cases of the virus making people crap more than normal?
There's a difference between not being named and not being identified. A spokeswoman for the health ministry confirmed the report. Her name isn't relevant. FYI there's a difference between "a spokeswoman for the health ministry confirmed the report" and "an anonymous source in the health ministry confirmed the report".
The person who posted the denial on CureVac's Twitter account also wasn't named. But that doesn't matter, does it?
Quoting frank
You've interpreted his words very differently to me. I understand him as saying "I have heard from several other members of government today that [the Trump administration was attempting to secure exclusive rights to any vaccine]."
Quoting frank
And again you're not understanding what I'm saying. A spokeswoman for the health ministry and the interior minister has confirmed the story. Should I believe them or should I believe CureVac (or more accurately, the CureVac Twitter account). There's no "unidentified source" being considered in my question.
Since any number of people can act as spokesperson for the health ministry, the person is unidentified. The fact that they aren't named tells you this:
The poor Reuters guy is trying to get somebody to go on record for this story and can't find anybody. He gets somebody from the Health Ministry who says the story is true, but when he asks if he can name her, she says, "No."
We can ponder on a while what it means when no one will go on record. We can discuss how to best approach news stories that give no source, and about how reporters have been known to go to jail to protect their sources and so on. But this is the vein of irrelevance here.
Nos, our resident bullshit-spreader said the story does not identify a source.
This is correct, Michael. Whatever confusions you may have experienced then or now, it's correct.
You then denied it twice. You claimed that a source was given.
You were wrong. You are the bullshit-spreader in this situation. As far as I can see, this situation will remain as it is.
In China, they used sticks.
The names of government spokespeople are very often not given. They're just called "spokesman/woman". And they either exist, in which case they are authorised to speak for the relevant minister, and can be considered to be doing so, or they don't. So, unless the spokesperson doesn't actually exist (no evidence for that), Michael was using his source in a perfectly valid way. At least, I don't see the objection except that the case is not open and shut.
:lol:
It starts with that. Then when things get worse moves on to just downplaying the threat until that stops being plausible too, and eventually these people just shut up because no-one's listening anymore.
I didn't correct you because you're wrong so much of the time, why bother?
:kiss:
You always get butthurt instead of engaging. *Shrug*.
Your prerogative. At least we agree on this:
Quoting frank
Seriously? Weeks of suffering leading to death? Suppose we were to execute people that way, with weeks of suffering on the way to death. Would that fly?
You clearly don't have any loved ones who are seriously at risk of dying from this thing.
But he's superfluous. I saw a Trump supporter say that a while back: that the trolls aren't actually accomplishing anything. I discounted it at the time because he was a dumb-ass with a MAGA hat. I think he was right though. The troll farms are an attempt to create distrust and confusion. They aren't creating much more than we already have.
They're wasting their time.
I’m still waiting on the “full story”, and that “conclusive evidence” you were talking about. One day, I suppose?
This gravity effect, I have realised is caused by a spell of sleep apnea/paralysis in which one tries to move, but can't, because the body is asleep. I find that some of my most inspirational, or prophetic dreams fleetingly happen during this struggle.
I used to interpret dreams many years ago, but lost interest when the idea of divination became an irrelevance for me.
You have to understand what the basic objective is (actually everywhere):
With social distancing and quarantine measures the objective is to have a lower amount of infections that the health sector can cope with the serious infections. While listening to the health care professionals (and not the politicians) a similar agenda can be noticed.
has above a good picture of what this means. To say this in another way: if the corona-virus spreads too quickly, the health sector cannot handle the serious cases and many many die because lack of proper treatment.
The virus will likely go through the population. The attempt is just to curb the high point and then finally have after enough people have had it (or a vaccine is introduced), the population will have the controversial (in Britain) herd immunity.
It's all about the curve. Voluntary and enforced social distancing worked in China and now, looking at today's figures, seems to be working in Italy. Pretty simple folks, shut up and copy what works.
So far, what's worked best is extensive testing and quarantine.
But keep updating us on your your great ideas about 'total lockdown'.
On social distancing, I've spoken personally to several South Koreans in their homes during the crisis. They've been voluntarily isolating even without symptoms. I'm all for that if it can be done. Again, copy what works.
On quarantine:
"Quarantine violators face up to 3 million won ($2500) fines. If a recent bill becomes law, the fine will go up to 10 million won and as much as a year in jail."
While that may fly with you and I, the liberty crowd aren't going to like it much and it's probably not going to be practical to enforce it in America in general. I like your authoritarian impulses though. Triggers the Stalinist in me. :p
Anyway, the article is ambiguous on the South Korean approach:
"Yet whether the success will hold is unclear. New case numbers are declining largely because the herculean effort to investigate a massive cluster of more than 5000 cases—60% of the nation’s total—linked to the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a secretive, messianic megachurch, is winding down. But because of that effort, “We have not looked hard in other parts of Korea,” says Oh Myoung-Don, an infectious disease specialist at Seoul National University...
New clusters are now appearing."
But good contribution. Keep it up.
And why are American doctors still resistant to testing, Dr Baden?
There were multiple issues with testing, including bureaucratic and others. Doctors want to test, but they need stuff that works, that's reliable, and they're sure they're using properly otherwise they'll understandably resist it. They also need the full support of government, which, at least initially, they didn't get.
E.g.
"Jeff Duchin, the public health chief in King County, Wash., where 37 deaths have been reported, suggested the lack of tests was critical, in addition to the fact that authorities had limited who could be tested. Initially, they had said tests would only be used for those who had traveled in affected regions of the globe or had otherwise been in contact with an infected person.
“So, you know, if we had the ability to test earlier, I’m sure we would have identified patients earlier in the community, possibly at hospitals, but we were also looking at not only availability of testing but whether patients met criteria for testing,” Duchin said.” So, given the fact that we just recently acquired our availability of testing and new criteria were published, this person was brought to our attention.”
...
"Thomas Frieden, an infectious disease physician who served as CDC director under former president Barack Obama, called on Sunday for an “independent group” to investigate what went wrong with the CDC’s testing process. He said in the past, the CDC moved quickly to produce tests for diseases such as H1N1, or swine flu.
“We were able to get test kits out fast,” Frieden said on CNN. “Something went wrong here. We have to find out why so we can prevent that in the future.”
Frieden said the agency has been muzzled under President Trump..."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/16/cdc-who-coronavirus-tests/
Time to catch up.
We don't reach out into the community to test people. Neither did China until after the disaster. It's because that would normally be considered a waste of money. Just wait until the illness announces itself and then act. Nobody realized we should be doing things differently because we've never had this situation before.
Just as Italy didn't realize the potential until overwhelmed, the US didn't understand until Italy. We're learning as we go. That includes you.
Yes, one thing I learned today was that the latest two severe cases (requiring intensive care) in a local hospital were two young people in their twenties with no underlying conditions. They had both taken anti-inflammatories though at the onset of symptoms.
I don't have the article to hand right now, but I think Ibuprofen was one. I don't recall prednisone being mentioned.
A steroid would diminish immune function. But ibuprofen? That's wacky.
In the absence of further info on how their calculation was done, I make it 244. Remember, it's every 5 days, not every day.
Day 1: 1 case + rate of spread = x 2.5 in 5 days.
So,
Day 5: 1 x 2.5 = 2.5
Day 10: 2.5 x 2.5= 6.25
Day 15: 6.25 x 2.5 = 15.6
Day 20: 15.6 x 2.5 = 39
Day 25: 39 x 2.5 = 97.6
Day 30: 97.6 x 2.5 = 244
I'll check it when I dig up the article.
Can't find the article. There's this too: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/14/anti-inflammatory-drugs-may-aggravate-coronavirus-infection
Mentions Ibuprofen. But I'm finding conflicting advice online tbh.
its not saying x are affected every 5 days only the first 5... hoping a math nerd will further explain. :mask:
I know, I'm just making the simplest inference. Gives me a result not too far off.